An Efficient and Physically Secure Privacy-Preserving Key-Agreement Protocol for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network

• Published in: IEEE transactions on intelligent transportation systems Vol. 24; no. 9; pp. 1 - 12
• Main Authors: Saleem, Muhammad Asad, Li, Xiong, Ayub, Muhammad Faizan, Shamshad, Salman, Wu, Fan, Abbas, Haider
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-09-2023; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: anonymity; Authentication; Communication; Computational efficiency; Computing costs; Cryptography; Cybersecurity; Data transmission; Denial of service attacks; Elliptic curve cryptography; key agreement; Mobile ad hoc networks; NS-3; Physical unclonable function; Privacy; Protocol; Protocol (computers); Protocols; Road conditions; Roadsides; Security; Traffic congestion; Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET); Vehicular ad hoc networks
• ISSN: 1524-9050; 1558-0016
• DOI: 10.1109/TITS.2023.3266030

The popularity of vehicles promotes the evolution of smart cities. This development makes vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) a widely used inter-vehicular communication to obtain information about road conditions, speed, vehicle location and traffic congestion. Such a public network is vulnerable to different security threats. Overall, the security of private data in VANET is a critical task. It has been observed that various authentication protocols have been devised for VANETs. However, most of the proposed protocols are not secure and reliable because of different security threats, including denial of service, replay, forgery and impersonation attacks, etc. Furthermore, the existing protocols used extra communication overhead and computational cost, so they become infeasible for resource-constrained environments. In this article, we design a lightweight and secure privacy-preserving key agreement protocol for VANETs using the hashing technique, which provides an efficient and secure data transmission mechanism over a public communication channel. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed protocol is secure against various attacks. To evaluate the performance of the protocol, we simulate key cryptographic operations of vehicles, a roadside unit, and a trusted party agent on Arduino, low-end and high-end devices, respectively. The experimental results show that compared with the other related protocols, the computational cost and communication overhead of our protocol are reduced on average by <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">8.797\%</tex-math> </inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">22.06 \%</tex-math> </inline-formula>, respectively. Additionally, simulation results on NS3 show that our protocol consistently achieves a packet delivery ratio higher than <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">99.91 \%</tex-math> </inline-formula>. Therefore, our protocol is secure and reliable for VANET environment.