Lightweight and Secure Multi-Factor Authentication Scheme in VANETs

The idea of a smart city and the utilization of vehicles are emerging rapidly. For inter-vehicular communication, this progression builds Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) an extensively used network. The VANET is used to obtain information regarding the road's condition, location of vehicles, speed, and traffic congestion description. The exchange of information in VANET is public which leads to severe security threats. Generally, one of the most crucial tasks in VANET is the security of data. So it becomes one of the urgent tasks of researchers. We have reviewed several authentication schemes for VANETs. Still, most schemes are not secure due to several attacks such as replay, denial of services, impersonation attacks, etc. Furthermore, the existing schemes used higher communication and computational costs, and they are also incompatible with VANET applications that are resource-constrained. This article presents the lightweight and secure multi-factor authenticated key agreement scheme for VANETs to ensure efficient and secure transmission of data via an open channel. Our presented scheme is secure, scalable, and lightweight compared to existing schemes due to its low computation and communication cost. The formal and informal security analysis proved that our scheme is more reliable, practical, and secure against several unknown adversarial attacks in VANETs.