No One Can Track You: Randomized Authentication in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are formed by a huge number of vehicles which act as the network nodes and communicate with one another. This emerging paradigm has opened up new business opportunities and enables numerous applications ranging from road safety enhancement to mobile entertainment. A fundamental issue that impacts the successful deployment of VANET applications is the security and privacy concerns raised by VANET users. However, it is a challenging task to authenticate vehicles while fully preserving their privacy. In this work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving randomized authentication protocol that leverages Homomorphic encryption to allow each individual vehicle to self-generate any number of authenticated identities to achieve full anonymity in VANETs. The proposed protocol prevents vehicles from being tracked by any single party including peer vehicles, service providers, authentication servers, and other infrastructure. Meanwhile, our protocol also provides traceability in case of any dispute. We have conducted both security analysis and experimental study which demonstrates the superiority of our protocol compared to other existing works