PMA-KDP: privacy-preserving mutual authentication and key distribution protocol in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs)

Due to technological advancement, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) which are one of the forms of Mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANETs) have become one of the most prevalent development paradigms for smart transportation systems where each vehicle equipped with sensors behaves as a mobile node. VANETs provide support for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication. To ensure the traffic safety and efficiency, VANETs are used to provide real time information of road condition, traffic condition, and weather condition to vehicles. To provide secure communication in VANETs, authenticity of the entity transmitting information becomes a critical aspect that needs to be addressed properly. Despite extensive protocols proposed for mutual authentication and secure key distribution in VANETs, they still have some limitations in terms of computation cost and security. Vijayakumar et al.’s and Cui et al.’s schemes (IEEE Trans Intell Transp Syst 17(4):1015–1028, 2015; Veh Commun 21:100200, 2020) provide better VANETs communication security but computation overheads of these protocols are significantly high which result in procrastinated authentication. Azam et al.’s (Glob Trans Proc 2(2):163–168, 2021) and Vighnesh et al.’s schemes (2011) fail to provide protection against fake Roadside Unit (RSU) attack on Trusted Authority (TA) and fake TA attack on RSU. Islam et al.’s scheme (Futur Gener Comput Syst 84:216–227, 2018) fails to provide message authentication. Therefore, in this work, we presented a computationally efficient privacy-preserving mutual authentication and a novel star topology based key distribution protocol for secure transmission in VANETs. Performance analysis clearly shows that proposed protocol significantly attenuates the computation overheads during the authentication message generation and verification compare to other existing protocols. Furthermore, our novel key distribution protocol eliminates the rekeying process i.e., any vehicle leaves or joins the group there is no need to change the secret parameters of existing vehicles. Security analysis shows that our scheme has robust security mechanism to provide protection against most prevalent security attacks. It also guarantees the backward, forward and group key secrecy.