EC-BAAS: Elliptic curve-based batch anonymous authentication scheme for Internet of Vehicles

As an indispensable part of intelligent transportation systems, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been widely used in improving the driving experience and road conditions. In the communication of IoV, the security of transmitted messages is critical. Specifically, the messages should be signed and verified before they are accepted by vehicles or road side units. To ensure the privacy of vehicle users, the vehicles’ true identity cannot be leaked. Moreover, considering the high dynamics and open environments of IoV, it is very important to design an efficient anonymous authentication scheme on the basis of security. However, most of the existing schemes struggle with the problems of insufficient security performance and low efficiency. This motivates us to propose a safe and efficient privacy protection scheme for IoV. The proposed scheme is a new batch anonymous authentication scheme designed based on the elliptic curve encryption algorithm, considering both security and efficiency. A distributed signature generation method is also developed in the proposed scheme to relieve the burden of the trusted center. In addition, our scheme can effectively track illegal vehicles and achieve conditional privacy protection. Theoretical analysis and performance evaluation are both carried out to validate our scheme. The results show that our scheme ensures competitive security performance with lower communication and computation overheads compared to representative approaches.