A VANET Anonymous Authentication Mechanism for Multi-level Application Scenarios

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a rapid developing application of the Internet of Things, which has totally difference with the conventional traffic network. On one hand, a VANET needs to provide end-to-end verification that has been widely concerned by researchers. On the other hand, the privacy is also very important in a VANET. Because of the openness of VANETs, conventional security measures do not effectively guarantee vehicle’s privacy. In other words, there is an urgent requirement for new security schemes to guarantee vehicular privacy in VANETs. Therefore, ensuring anonymity and authentication is a double requirement in VANETs. The both requirements seem contradictory but have to coexist. However, effective technology is few in literature and the existing anonymous authentication schemes cannot provide reverse trace mechanism when anonymity abuse happens. At the same time, these existing researches are limited to the application layer without considering the particularity of the perception layer and network layer. Without the support of the lower layer, the upper layer cannot achieve real security. Our aim is to build a lightweight anonymous authentication security system under the privacy preserving which considers the limitation of bottom layer devices and anonymity abuse problem.