ECLAS: Efficient Certificateless Aggregate Signature With Minimal Latency in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a critical component of modern transportation systems, offering significant benefits in terms of safety, efficiency, and user experience. However, addressing challenges related to security, privacy, and scalability is essential for their successful implementation and widespread adoption. The verification of digital signatures in VANETs is crucial for security and privacy issues, but it can generate significant communication overhead due to certificate management, signature transmissions, and verification computations. This can lead to scalability issues, where the system becomes less efficient and more prone to delays. In this article, we propose an efficient certificateless aggregate signature scheme (ECLAS) to address the above three challenges. The ECLAS scheme is proven to be a secure certificateless signature scheme against chosen-message attacks in the random oracle model. Therefore, the ECLAS scheme eliminates certificate management in the system. Furthermore, the performance comparison shows that the ECLAS scheme achieves the shortest signature size and the most efficient verification cost for traffic-related message transmissions. Consequently, the ECLAS scheme achieves minimal communication latency in VANETs.