Abstract
Vehicle in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) broadcasts beacons about their traffic status wirelessly for improving traffic safety and efficiency. Before deployment of the VANET system, problems related to security and privacy should be carefully addressed. In this article, we propose a lightweight authentication with conditional privacy-preserving scheme for guaranteeing secure communication in VANET. The proposed scheme is suitable for addressing issues related to security and privacy because it combines the tamper-proof device (TPD) based schemes with the roadside unit (RSU) based schemes. Based on elliptic curve cryptography, the proposed scheme preloads the initial public parameters and keys of the system in each TPD of RSU instead of the TPD of the on-border unit (OBU). Furthermore, the proposed scheme not only achieve security and privacy requirements but also resists common security attacks. The performance evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has a lower cost compared with other existing schemes in terms of computation cost and communication cost.