SEPA-CRT: SDN Enabled Direction Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme Using Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) for VANET

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) provides an exchange of crucial, general safety, and traffic-related information among vehicles. However, before the exchange of this information, the vehicles must be authenticated to prevent unauthorized access. There are different techniques for authenticating the vehicles, but group-based authentication is preferred. For this reason, authentication schemes proposed by researchers are mostly group-based. However, sorting vehicles based on their moving direction has not been addressed in any of these group-based authentication schemes. A direction-based group of vehicles is possible in situations like a convoy of trucks, ambulances, or a military unit. Additionally, considering the rapid mobility of the deployed vehicles, tasks such as the formation of the group and then selecting a group leader for assigning the credentials to communicate poses a difficulty. Therefore, an authentication scheme that includes the benefits of Software Defined Networking (SDN) can administrate the data and control planes to oversee the frequent transmission of data. In this manuscript, an SDN-enabled privacy-preserving authentication scheme using the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) and IOTA Tangle, called SEPA-CRT has been proposed. The reliability and robustness of SEPA-CRT in the face of potential security vulnerabilities have been established by applying the Random Oracle Model (ROM) and the automated Scyther Tool. The effectiveness of SEPA-CRT, relative to other schemes in the literature, is validated through a performance evaluation utilizing the renowned MIRACL library.