Sybil-resistant and privacy-preserving authentication based on short-term pseudonym for internet of vehicles

By sharing basic safety messages (BSMs) containing driving information, internet of vehicles becomes an important part in cooperative intelligent transportation systems. Designing a secure, privacy-preserving and efficient authentication scheme is an imperative and challenging issue. Vehicles should use different anonymous identities to send BSMs to resist trajectory tracking attacks. However, malicious vehicles may use multiple identities at the same time to launch Sybil attacks. In terms of efficiency, some schemes use time-consuming computation operations such as bilinear pairing and have very costly computation time for verifying signatures. To solve these problems, we construct a Sybil-resistant and privacy-preserving (SRPP) authentication scheme. In SRPP, vehicles use different short-term pseudonyms in different road side unit (RSU) jurisdictions, and short-term pseudonyms need to be authorized by RSUs. In terms efficiency, SRPP scheme mainly uses computationally efficient multiplication operations and point addition operations on elliptic curve, and realizes batch verification. Security proof and analysis show that SRPP scheme can meet security requirements and resist multiple types of attacks such as replay and DoS. The performance evaluation demonstrates that compared with recent proposed schemes, SRPP scheme is practical in terms of computation time and communication overhead while resisting Sybil attacks and trajectory tacking attacks.