A Lightweight Cross-Domain Direct Identity Authentication Protocol for VANETs

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology and the growth of traffic demand, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) will become a major component of intelligent transportation systems. However, identity authentication in VANETs has emerged as a crucial challenge in maintaining communication security. The existing identity authentication methods have complex certificate management and key escrow problems, and many authentication schemes can not resist common attacks and are inefficient. Also, the above proposals cannot meet the lightweight needs of the IoT. At the same time, vehicles in the VANETs may move between different network domains, which will lead to an increase in cross-domain identity authentication requirements. Therefore, this article proposes an efficient and lightweight cross-domain direct identity authentication protocol. We apply the unpaired certificateless signature scheme to the cross-domain authentication and generate cross-domain communication credentials for the vehicles in advance in the local domain, which will greatly improve the efficiency of cross-domain authentication between the vehicles. In addition, we demonstrate the security of our protocol and further validate the security of the protocol through the simulation experiments. Finally, experiments show that our protocol is more efficient than the existing authentication protocols.