A Secure and Low-Overhead Authentication Protocol for Vehicle Ad Hoc Networks with Batch and Transfer Authentication

Summary

In a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), vehicles communicate with each other, and every message must be verified to prevent malicious interference. Traditional authentication methods verify each vehicle individually, creating significant delays. To address this issue, the proposed research introduces an authentication mechanism that combines batch and transfer authentication.

Abstract

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) require secure, efficient, and scalable authentication mechanisms to ensure trust among vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Traditional one-to-one authentication approaches often lead to high communication and computational overheads, making them unsuitable for large-scale vehicular environments. This leads to a security traffic jam, rendering the process inefficient and unsuitable for real-time safety applications. To address this, study proposes a lightweight authentication protocol that supports both batch and transfer authentication, enabling multiple vehicles to be authenticated simultaneously and allowing authentication validity to be transferred between RSUs without re-executing the full protocol. In batch authentication, a roadside unit verifies a group of vehicles simultaneously instead of one at a time, much like a guard approving an entire busload of pre-verified passengers, which greatly reduces delays at intersections or toll booths. In transfer authentication, when a vehicle moves from one roadside unit’s area to another, the verification data are securely transferred, allowing seamless continuity without restarting the process, similar to a concert wristband that lets attendees move between stages without repeated checks. This scheme leverages the mathematical properties of Chebyshev polynomials to provide strong security with reduced overhead. Performance analysis shows that the proposed method achieves a communication cost of only 42n bytes and a significantly lower computational complexity than existing schemes. This approach enhances scalability, reduces message exchange, and maintains robust resistance against common attacks, making it well-suited for real-time vehicular communications. Overall, this new protocol enhances the practicality of VANETs by reducing data overhead, accelerating authentication, and efficiently managing high traffic volumes, making it a secure and scalable solution for the future of intelligent transportation systems.

Introduction

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) enable vehicles to communicate with each other (vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V)) and with vehicles to roadside infrastructure (vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I)) to improve the safety and efficiency of transportation. In this open wireless environment, any vehicle can broadcast safety messages (e.g., accident warnings or traffic updates); therefore, robust authentication is critical to ensure that the messages originate from legitimate sources. Simultaneously, VANETs impose strict performance requirements, and vehicles exchange messages at high frequencies (often 10 messages per second), leaving only a few milliseconds to verify eac....

Protocol

Preliminaries

System model: The VANET system consists of three primary entity types: trusted authority (TA), roadside units (RSUs), and vehicles with onboard units (OBUs). The TA is central to initiating the initialization, key management, and occasional revocation. It is fully trusted and typically government- or infrastructure-controlled. Each RSU is a stationary unit deployed along the road. This provides a communication infrastructure; in this model, RSUs are assumed to be connected to the TA via a secure backbone (e.g., fiber or a secure network) so they can send or receive updates from the TA as needed. Vehicles are e....

Results

Security analysis

Informal security analysis

Impersonation attack: An adversary may attempt to impersonate a legitimate vehicle u_i or roadside unit (RSU) to gain unauthorized access or disrupt authentication, but such impersonation is computationally infeasible due to the robust security mechanisms in place. Each vehicle and RSU employs Chebyshev polynomial-based signatures, which involve their respective private keys (v<.......

Discussion

The proposed batch and transfer authentication scheme significantly enhances VANET performance by overcoming the limitations of traditional one-to-one verification. Through batch authentication, multiple vehicles can be authenticated simultaneously by an RSU, reducing computational and communication load and enabling efficient large-scale operation in dense traffic conditions. This mechanism ensures faster authentication cycles and better bandwidth utilization, making it suitable for real-time vehicular networks that dem.......

Materials

List of materials used in this article

Name	Company	Catalog Number	Comments
Component	Specification / Details
Batch Size (n)	10 to 100 vehicles
Comparison Schemes	[20],[21],[22] (analytical from literature)
Cryptographic Primitives	Chebyshev polynomials (custom recursive implementation), SHA-256 hash
Hardware Platform	Intel Core i7 processor, 16 GB RAM, Windows 11 (or your specific OS)
Key Libraries	hashlib (for SHA-256), time (for measurements), built-in math operations
Measurement Method	Average execution time over 1000 iterations using time module
Prime Modulus (p)	256–512 bits (small values like 7919 used for testing; scaled for security analysis)
Programming Language	Python 3.10
Simulation Type	Cryptographic operation timing (no network simulator used)