LESPP: lightweight and efficient strong privacy preserving authentication scheme for secure VANET communication

Authentication in vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is still a research challenge, as it requires not only secure and efficient authentication, but also privacy preservation. In this paper, we proposed a lightweight and efficient authentication scheme (LESPP) with strong privacy preservation for secure VANET communication. The proposed scheme utilizes self-generated pseudo identity to guarantee both privacy preservation and conditional traceability, and it only requires a lightweight symmetric encryption and message authentication code (MAC) generation for message signing and a fast MAC re-generation for verification. Compared with currently existing public key based schemes, the proposed scheme significantly reduces computation cost by $$10^2$$102–$$10^3$$103 times and decreases communication overhead by 41.33–77.60 %, thus achieving resilience to denial of service (DoS) attack. In LESPP, only key management center can expose a vehicle’s real identity from its pseudo identity, therefore, LESPP provides strong privacy preservation so that the adversaries cannot trace any vehicles, even if all roadside units are compromised. Furthermore, vehicles in LESPP need not maintain certificate revocation list (CRL), so any CRL related overhead is avoided. Extensive simulations reveal that the novel scheme is feasible and has an outstanding performance of nearly 0 ms network delay and 0 % packet loss ratio, which are especially appropriate for realtime emergency event reporting applications.