Self-certified privacy-preserving scheme for vehicle-to-vehicle communications

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), vehicles should exchange safety-related messages with each other while processing them within short time in their embedded on-board units. Most previous authentication schemes unfortunately are not ready to be deployed for vehicle-to-vehicle communications owing to serious practical shortcomings, such as the enormous expense of building additional facilities (e.g., roadside units), computation and communication bottlenecks, a huge certificate revocation list, and low processing capacity. To alleviate these problems, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving scheme with which each vehicle (specifically, its embedded on-board unit) can produce valid one-time certificates without help from any third party. The scheme is cost-effective because additional facilities are not needed and it can also prevent bottlenecks on a certain trusted entity because certificates are self-produced.