Biometrics-based Data Link Layer Anonymous Authentication in VANETs

The vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) aims to make road traffic safer and more efficient. Security and privacy are two important but somewhat contradictory objectives. On the one hand, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) authentication requires drivers to present some individual credentials. On the other hand, drivers need privacy protections on their identities, physical locations, and other contextual information. No sensitive information should be unnecessarily exposed during the authentication phase. Therefore, anonymous authentication is expected to play a critical role in VANET. In this paper, we propose a novel biometrics-based anonymous mutual authentication with provable link-layer location privacy preservation. During its authentication phase, two vehicles negotiate their temporary session key and generate two temporary MAC addresses. These two addresses, instead of the real ones, are used in all future communication frames. We further protect the biometric privacy with the help of a biometric encryption technique. Our analysis and simulation results show that the protocol is superior and lightweight with strong security and privacy protection.