Highly efficient randomized authentication in VANETs

Considering the huge number of vehicles on the roads, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are envisioned to foster a variety of new applications ranging from road safety enhancement to mobile entertainment. These new VANET applications all face a critical challenge which is to ensure the identity and location privacy of vehicles' owners who participate in such ad-hoc network. In this paper, we propose a highly efficient randomized authentication protocol that leverages homomorphic encryption to allow each individual vehicle to self-generate any number of authenticated identities to achieve full anonymity in VANETs. The proposed protocol prevents vehicles from being tracked by any single party including peer vehicles, service providers, authentication servers, and other infrastructure. Meanwhile, our protocol also provides traceability in case of any dispute. We have conducted both security analysis and experimental study which demonstrates the superiority of our protocol compared to other existing works.