Abstract
In VANETs, vehicles broadcast traffic-related messages periodically according to Dedicated Short Range Communication protocol. To ensure the reliability and integrity of messages, authentication schemes are involved in VANETs. As traffic-related messages are time-sensitive, they must be verified and processed timely, or it may cause inestimable harm to the traffic system. However, the OBUs and the RSUs are limited in computation ability and cannot afford vast messages' verification. Recently, some identity-based authentication schemes using bilinear pairing have been proposed to improve the efficiency of message verification for VANETs. Nevertheless, the bilinear pairing is not suited for VANETs due to its complex operations. The design of an efficient and secure authentication scheme with low computation cost for VANETs still is a rewarding challenge. To settle this challenge, a new efficient identity-based authentication scheme is proposed in this paper. The proposed scheme ensures reliability and integrity of messages and provides conditional privacy-preserving. Compared with the most recent proposed authentication schemes for VANETs, the computation costs of the message signing and verification in the proposed scheme reduce by 88 and 93 % respectively, while security analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme satisfies all security and privacy requirements for VANETs.