VAuth: Robust Lightweight Mutual Authentication Protocol Preserving User’s Anonymity for VANET With FPGA Implementation

Many applications that are developed for the Intelligent Transport System to ensure safety, efficiency and comfort, depend on communication among mobile vehicular nodes, road side units, fog servers, and trusted authority. Insecure wireless communication used for these applications is vulnerable to many attacks and it can endanger lives, create traffic congestion, and compromise privacy of the users. A robust authentication and key establishment mechanism can prevent security attacks, and also provide additional security features. In this paper, a novel, smart card-based, robust mutual authentication protocol namely VAuth for VANET is proposed. This scheme enables secure communication among entities while also preserving the anonymity and privacy of the users. To preserve unlinkability, VAuth uses pseudo-names, one-time secrets, and verification tokens. Correctness and security goals of the proposed protocol are proved using the formal method BAN logic and the automated tool Scyther respectively. A comparison of the scheme considering communication cost, computation cost, security functionalities, and storage cost is presented. As a proof of concept, our proposed protocol is demonstrated on FPGA boards which offer hardware acceleration capabilities that can handle high mobility of vehicles involved in VANET.