An Efficient and Anonymous Authentication Key Agreement Protocol for Smart Transportation System

Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANET) is the fundamental unit for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) controlling and real-time monitoring the Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication. Due to wireless communication channels, vehicles and Roadside Units (RSU) are susceptible to various network attacks, especially security and privacy. Many existing schemes focused on message authentication but did not respond quickly, hence inefficient. There is a great demand to develop an efficient and anonymous authentication protocol to ensure secure communication between different vehicles without revealing their identities. To address these issues, this article presents a lightweight anonymous authentication key agreement scheme between vehicles and RSUs using smart cards and biometrics only. In addition, authentication involves only two entities, at a time, without involving the Registration Centre. The proposed scheme bypasses costly operations like bilinear pairing and multiplication on an elliptic curve instead uses lightweight operations hash function and exclusive-OR operations to ensure the scheme is computationally efficient. Along with all the known attacks, the proposed scheme attains forward secrecy, detects unauthorized login quickly, and revokes smart cards.