A simple authentication scheme for providing privacy support with user anonymity in VANET

In VANET environments, messages between vehicles, and vehicles and infrastructures have to be kept secure. To authenticate users and messages, many authentication schemes are proposed. Previous works are hard to deploy, and to maintain entire users through one Certificate Agent (CA). Also, the authentication methods to authenticate users are complicated, and need more time for users to be authenticated. To solve this problem, the distribution of the CA's role and a simple mutual authenticar tion scheme are needed. In this paper, we propose a simple authentication scheme to provide user anonymity and mutual authentication in VANET. Our proposed scheme is based on smart cards and one-way hash function. By using our scheme, the number of transmitting messages that need to be authenticated could be minimized, and at the same time, the network overhead could be reduced, through the distribution of CAs.