Secure hierarchical authentication protocol in VANET

Abstract

The 5G technology will promote the development of vehicle ad hoc networks (VANET). However, almost all the existing authentication protocols rely on a completely trusted authority (TA), which undoubtedly raises a heavy burden on the TA. On the other hand, these protocols can rarely resist some special attacks, such as registration authority leaks registration information attack and ephemeral secret leakage attack. To address these problems, based on the self‐certified public keys and Schnorr signatures, the authors propose a hierarchical revocable authentication protocol in VANET. The proposed protocol is provably secure in the random oracle model under the Diffie‐Hellman assumption. Performance analysis illustrates that the protocol greatly saves computation resources and satisfies the well‐known security requirements. Therefore, the proposed protocol is suitable for the VANET environment.