SD2PA: a fully safe driving and privacy-preserving authentication scheme for VANETs

The basic idea behind the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is the exchange of traffic information between vehicles and the surrounding environment to offer a better driving experience. Privacy and security are the main concerns for meeting the safety aims of the VANET system. In this paper, we analyse recent VANET schemes that utilise a group authentication technique and found important vulnerabilities in terms of driving safety. These systems also suffer from vulnerabilities in terms of management efficiency and computational complexity. To defeat these problems, we propose a lightweight scheme, SD2PA, based on a general hash function for VANET. The proposed scheme overcomes the non-safe driving problem that resulted from the critical driving area. Moreover, the vehicle authentication is only done once by the VANET system administrator during the vehicle's moving, so the authentication redundancy for the entire system is reduced and system management efficiency is enhanced. The SD2PA scheme also provides anonymity to protect the vehicle's privacy, unless an important action needs to be taken against a malicious vehicle. A deep computational cost and communicational overhead analysis indicates that SD2PA is better than related schemes, as well as efficiently meeting VANET's security and privacy needs.