Abstract: Intelligent vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are the core of intelligent transportation systems, in recent years, it has received increasing attentions from the academic community. However, due to the openness and fragility, VANETs are confronted with many security problems. In order to solve the problems such as two-way authentication between intelligent vehicles and nearby RSUs, exchange of session keys and anonymity of intelligent vehicles, this paper proposes an anonymous authentication and key exchange protocol in the intelligent vehicle networks. In the protocol, an identity-based digital signature algorithm is designed to enable the intelligent vehicle to send authentication information to the nearby road side unit (RSU) in a completely anonymous manner. After the RSU validates the authentication information, a message authentication code will be calculated and sent to the intelligent vehicle as the response to realize two-way authentication. In addition, during the anonymous authentication process, the session key can be negotiated for subsequent secure communication. The protocol is designed based on the identity cryptosystem, which does not need complex certificate management. The performance evaluation shows that this protocol can be effectively deployed in intelligent vehicle application scenarios with highly sensitive information.

Key words: intelligent vehicular ad hoc networks, identity anonymity, key exchange, two-way authentication, message authentication code