A Batch Authentication Design to Protect Conditional Privacy in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of vehicles (IoV), a novel technology, holds paramount importance within the transportation domain due to its ability to increase traffic efficiency and safety. Information privacy is of vital importance in IoV when sharing information among vehicles. However, due to the openness of the communication network, information sharing is vulnerable to potential attacks, such as impersonation, modification, side-channel and replay attacks, and so on. In order to resolve the aforementioned problem, we present a conditional privacy-preserving batch authentication (CPPBA) scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). The proposed scheme avoids the certificate management problem, conducing to efficiency improvement. When a message is transmitted by a vehicle, its pseudo identity rather than the real identity is also broadcasted along with the shared message, which protects the privacy of the vehicle’s identity. But this privacy is conditional because TA and only the TA can reveal the real identity of the vehicle by tracing. The proposed scheme is batch verifiable, which reduces the computation costs. In addition, our scheme does not involve bilinear pairing operations and does not use the map-to-point hash function, thus making the verification process more effective. An exhaustive efficiency comparison has been carried to show that the proposed CPPBA scheme has lower computation, communication, and storage overheads than the state-of-the-art ones. A relatively comprehensive security analysis has also been carried, which not only shows that the signature design in the CPPBA scheme is unforgeable under the random oracle model but also illustrates that the CPPBA scheme is resistant to various potential attacks. The security is also verified by a popular automated simulation tool, that is, AVISPA.