Location-based anonymous authentication for vehicular communications

We present an anonymous authentication scheme for vehicular networks, that provides conditional anonymity to collocated vehicles. A modified ECDSA mechanism utilizes the position information of vehicles operating together in close proximity for generation and verification of elliptic curve-based signatures on safety and other application messages. This waives the requirement of a third party public-key certificate for message authentication in VANET. Our scheme provides a privacy-preserving, lightweight, secure, and compatible instant authentication for vehicle-originated safety messages. Security analysis and simulation experiments justify the usefulness of our scheme.