SAMA: a secure and anonymous mutual authentication with conditional identity-tracking scheme for a unified car sharing system

Abstract

Development of an efficient anonymous authentication scheme for an effective car sharing system is not new; however, to develop a single key-based authentication scheme for inter-service in a unified cars sharing system is a challenging issue. Although some existing schemes are capable of providing secure authentication in vehicular ad hoc network but majority of them are network-specific or provider-specific with high computational latency incurred from their signatures and certificates verification processes. Besides, some of them could not guarantee confidentiality and integrity through a single private key, thus creating overheads through different keys generation and storage. In this paper, an effective anonymous authentication scheme, which is capable of detecting and preventing malicious entity from disrupting the operations of the car sharing system, is proposed. The scheme also provides a conditional identity-tracing approach to track and expose a malicious entity by revoking the privacy of the misbehaving entity. The scheme allows inter-operations among the different car sharing service providers by allowing registered users of any provider to share cars of other providers aside from the one registered with. This enriches service provision for users. The scheme is analysed, the experimental and analysis results show that our scheme is not only secure but also with low computational latency.