Authenticated key agreement (AKA) between vehicles and road side units (RSUs) is crucial in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, existing solutions still suffer from high overheads of AKA and lack a mechanism to balance privacy strength and system efficiency. In this paper, we present a lightweight anonymous authenticated key agreement (LWAKA) scheme for VANETs, supporting lightweight anonymous authentication and key agreement between vehicles and RSUs simultaneously. In particular, vehicles’ authentication information is synchronized to target RSUs in advance for accelerating authentication, and lightweight cryptographic operations (i.e., hash function, hash-based message authentication, physical unclonable function, fuzzy extractor and symmetric encryption) are employed to ensure the high efficiency of AKA in terms of computation and communication overheads. The system efficiency and privacy are balanced through modeling the relationship between the frequency of pseudonym updates and the unlinkability of the vehicles’ new and old pseudonyms. Security analysis shows that LWAKA not only achieves anonymity, conditional privacy, pseudonym unlinkability, key escrow freeness, and physical security, but also resists against most known attacks. Comparative experimental results demonstrate that LWAKA outperforms existing schemes in terms of lightweight design.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    LWAKA: Lightweight Anonymous Authenticated Key Agreement for VANETs


    Contributors:
    Liu, Gao (author) / Li, Hao (author) / Le, Junqing (author) / Wang, Ning (author) / Mu, Nankun (author) / Liu, Zhiquan (author) / Liu, Yining (author) / Xiang, Tao (author)


    Publication date :

    2025-06-01


    Size :

    1950081 byte




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English



    An Efficient Key Agreement And Anonymous Mutual Authentication Protocols For Secure Communication In VANETs

    Kona, Swathi / Morthala, Sai Venkata Krishna Reddy / Konathala, Rakesh et al. | IEEE | 2022


    A Cost-Efficient Anonymous Authenticated and Key Agreement Scheme for V2I-Based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

    Saleem, Muhammad Asad / Li, Xiong / Mahmood, Khalid et al. | IEEE | 2024


    Privacy-enhanced capabilities for VANETs using direct anonymous attestation

    Whitefield, Jorden / Chen, Liqun / Giannetsos, Thanassis et al. | IEEE | 2017