Enabling Fast and Privacy-Preserving Broadcast Authentication With Efficient Revocation for Inter-Vehicle Connections

Abstract

Many vehicular applications, especially safety-related ones, rely on spatial-temporal messages periodically broadcast by vehicles. In the absence of a secure authentication scheme, invalid spatial-temporal messages may be sent out by malicious vehicles. Meanwhile, malicious applications may also collect a lot of personal information from spatial-temporal messages. Since inter-vehicle connections are often deployed in high-moving traffic, any authentication must be implemented in real-time. To meet all these properties, we propose a Fast and Anonymous Spatial-Temporal Trust (FastTrust) scheme for inter-vehicle connections. In contrast to most authentication protocols which rely on fixed infrastructures, FastTrust is mostly designed on hash chains and an entropy-based commitment, and is able to secure periodic spatial-temporal messages. FastTrust also protects vehicles' privacy by deploying a pseudonym-varying scheduling mechanism to satisfy the anonymity and unlinkability requirements. Finally, in order to efficiently isolate malicious vehicles, a lightweight certificate management scheme is proposed for the limited bandwidth of vehicular networks. We provide analytical evaluations to show that our FastTrust achieves the security and privacy properties. Extensive validations are done to show that FastTrust can authenticate dozens of times faster than the existing signature algorithms, and isolate malicious vehicles at a low cost in terms of communication and computational resources.