A lightweight authentication scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks based on MSR

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) has become a promising technology for nowadays' intelligent transportation system (ITS). Secure communications in VANETs can help improve safe and comfortable driving environment for drivers. In order to guarantee secure communication, security, privacy, and efficiency should be carefully considered during the deployment of VANETs. In this paper, we propose a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme to enhance the communication security in VANETs. The proposed scheme employs the modular square root (MSR) technique to achieve the design goals. The security analysis demonstrates that our scheme achieves more advantages on supporting mutual authentication and other security requirements by comparing with existing schemes. We also provide the authentication proof using BAN logic and analyze the security validation using ProVerif. Additionally, compared with existing schemes, our scheme significantly reduces the computation delay on message signing and verification by at least 150 times. Meanwhile, the communication cost of our scheme achieves a reduction of nearly 25%.