ANEL: A novel efficient and lightweight authentication scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks

Due to the large traffic congestion in modern-day, Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) becomes an important approach to improve human safety and driving comfort. The large traffic congestion increases the number of transmitted messages, which in turn increases the computations and communications overheads in VANET. Hence, VANET requires not only efficient communications, but also lightweight security mechanisms to overcome security challenges. There are many schemes provide security to VANET by using cryptography techniques such as elliptic curve technique, session key technique, public key technique, and message authentication code technique. The schemes that use the message authentication code are called MAC-based authentication schemes. They considered as the best schemes in terms of computation and communication overheads when compared with other schemes that use other cryptography techniques, but they have some limitations. This paper proposes a novel efficient and lightweight authentication scheme (ANEL). The ANEL is a MAC-based authentication scheme that offers all the advantages of the MAC-based authentication schemes and overcomes all their limitations at the same time. In addition, the proposed scheme can achieve security objectives of VANET such as authentication, privacy-preservation, non-repudiation, etc. Moreover, our scheme provides an efficient biological password login, system key update, biological password update, and other security services. Furthermore, in this proposed scheme, the Trust Authority (TA) can disclose the source driver and vehicle of each malicious message. The security analysis shows that ANEL is the first scheme that provides countermeasures on the disclosure of system key, and it can protect VANET from various well-known attacks. The comparison results of our scheme with existing MAC-based authentication schemes in terms of computation overhead, communication overhead, and security services show that the proposed scheme is more efficient and provides a high level of security. The simulation results with ONE simulator demonstrate that our scheme reduces the message authentication time and end-to-end delay when compared with previous security schemes discussed in the literature.