A Certificate Free Anonymous Authentication Scheme Based on Pseudo Identity in VANETs

This article addresses the need for identity privacy protection in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) and analyzes the current research status and limitations of anonymous authentication schemes both domestically and internationally. Although existing schemes provide a certain level of conditional privacy protection, there is still room for optimization in the distribution and management of pseudonyms, and they generally rely on certificate management and key escrow. To address these issues, this article proposes a certificate-free anonymous authentication scheme based on pseudonyms to improve authentication efficiency, optimize protocol design, and enhance attack resistance. The proposed scheme introduces a Key Generation Center (KGC) to solve the key escrow problem, designs a certificate-free signature method to accelerate authentication speed, and utilizes fog nodes to optimize the management of pseudonyms. Through security analysis and performance evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme effectively protects identity privacy while achieving better authentication efficiency and attack resistance compared to similar schemes.