A Lightweight Authentication Scheme for VANETs Based on secGear

In recent years, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are widely used in transportation and daily life. Because the driving information of a vehicle is transmitted via the public channels of VANETs, the driving information is vulnerable to eavesdropping and tampering. Therefore, ensuring the security of VANETs is particularly important. However, most works assume that the environment of roadside units and on-board units is completely safe, which is an unreasonable stance to take as VANETs are evidently vulnerable to privileged user attack and malware attack. In order to solve this weakness and improve the practicability of VANETs, we adopted Confidential Computing technology and proposed a secure authentication scheme. Our scheme adopted decentralized network architecture and achieved dynamic authentication credentials. In addition, we not only proposed a lightweight vehicle-to-infrastructure authentication scheme, but also proposed the vehicle-to-vehicle authentication scheme. We adopted ROR, AVISPA tools and rigorously informal security analysis to prove the security of the proposed scheme. In addition, we analyzed the detailed overheads and adopted NS-3 to conduct the performance analysis. Finally, the results of the security analysis, performance analysis, and comparison analysis proved the effectiveness of our proposed scheme to provide security and protection.