Secure and Efficient Mutual Authentication Protocol for VANETs Using Edge Computing and Signature-Based Cryptography

Security in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) as a result, vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) need to adopt and implement strong security protocols respective to vehicle-tovehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communication. But state-ofthe-art authentication methods have drawbacks like computational overhead, scalability issues, and susceptibility to identity stealing, replay attacks and data manipulation. To mitigate these issues, we present an innovative protocol for mutual authentication in edge computing assisted VANEts by employing an elliptic curve signature-based to improve the security and performance of the protocol. The proposed scheme guarantees low-latency authenticated by offloading computation tasks to edge nodes and simultaneously provides conditional privacy-preserving vehicle tracing for law enforcement. Formal security verification using ProVerif shows to be resilient towards replays, man-in-the-middle and eavesdropping attacks. Simulation results also show that the proposed protocol achieves highly efficient computational and communication overhead in comparison with current approaches. The performance results are promising and therefore, the proposed scheme can I be considered as practical and scalable for realistic applications in VANET.