An Efficient Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Cross-zone Scenarios in VANETs

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) serve as a critical solution for ensuring the safe and efficient operation of intelligent transportation systems and show great potential in the deployment of autonomous driving scenarios. To address the challenges posed by large-scale vehicular topologies, zone encryption and authentication schemes have been proposed to enhance communication efficiency and privacy in VANETs. However, the complex verification processes during cross-zone scenarios can cause service interruptions and increase the risks of attacks and impersonation, leading to significant security vulnerabilities. To tackle the inefficiencies and privacy concerns of existing cross-zone authentication schemes, we propose a fast cross-zone authentication scheme tailored for autonomous driving scenarios in VANETs. By integrating long-term and short-term credential issuance mechanisms, the proposed scheme reduces certificate storage overhead and achieves efficient anonymous batch authentication, significantly lowering communication delays during zone transitions. Moreover, the scheme's rapid cross-zone verification minimizes interactions with untrusted entities, achieving an authentication speed of 0.45 ms per vehicle. Security analyses demonstrate that the proposed scheme supports anonymous tracing of malicious vehicles and effectively resists common attacks. Experimental and simulation results indicate that under the proposed rapid cross-zone authentication mechanism, the computational complexity of the verification process is significantly reduced, outperforming existing comparable approaches in terms of authentication overhead and latency.