Protocols Design and Area Division for Privacy-Preserving Delay-Aware Authentication in Vehicular Networks

The problem of security and privacy in vehicular networks is a vital issue, and it attracts increasing attention to address the security vulnerability of vehicular networks. Authentication solutions are introduced for vehicular networks to ensure that network access is only given to authorized users. Among authentication solutions for vehicular networks, group signature not only offers authentication services, but also provides conditional privacy preservation. However, the current group signature approach for authentication in vehicular networks exhibits time-consuming signature verification and poor scalability. To overcome these shortcomings, we propose a flexible and efficient delay-aware authentication scheme (FEDAS) by utilizing edge computing paradigm. In the proposed architecture, we design the authentication group maintaining mechanism and develop the collaborative CRL management method. Moreover, we propose transition zone to solve the reliable authentication problem in border area of the group. To implement the proposed architecture, we propose a model for calculating the length of local CRL, which establishes the relationship between the size of a sub-area and the length of local CRL. And we also design a method for area division based on the length of local CRL, which provides division principle for our authentication scheme. We conduct extensive simulations to verify the effectiveness of our proposed scheme.