2FLIP: A two-factor lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme for VANET

Authentication in a vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) requires not only secure and efficient authentication with privacy preservation but applicable flexibility to handle complicated transportation circumstances as well. In this paper, we proposed a Two-Factor LIghtweight Privacy-preserving authentication scheme (2FLIP) to enhance the security of VANET communication. 2FLIP employs the decentralized certificate authority (CA) and the biological-password-based two-factor authentication (2FA) to achieve the goals. Based on the decentralized CA, 2FLIP only requires several extremely lightweight hashing processes and a fast message-authentication-code operation for message signing and verification between vehicles. Compared with previous schemes, 2FLIP significantly reduces computation cost by 100-1000 times and decreases communication overhead by 55.24%-77.52%. Furthermore, any certificate revocation list (CRL)-related overhead on vehicles is avoided. 2FLIP makes the scheme resilient to denial-of-service attack in both computation and memory, which is caused by either deliberate invading behaviors or jammed traffic scenes. The proposed scheme provides strong privacy preservation that the adversaries can never succeed in tracing any vehicles, even with all RSUs compromised. Moreover, it achieves strong nonrepudiation that any biological anonym driver could be conditionally traced, even if he is not the only driver of the vehicle. Extensive simulations reveal that 2FLIP is feasible and has an outstanding performance of nearly 0-ms network delay and 0% packet-loss ratio, which are particularly appropriate for real-time emergency reporting applications.