Enhancing privacy in Internet of Vehicles through a streamlined certificateless ECC-based authentication protocol

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), secure and low-latency authentication is challenging due to high mobility and computational constraints. This paper proposes a certificateless conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) protocol based on elliptic curve cryptography, eliminating bilinear pairing and certificate management overhead. A split-key mechanism mitigates key escrow, while a seed-based pseudonym approach enables privacy-preserving and conditionally traceable identity management. The scheme also supports batch verification to improve efficiency under high traffic loads. Security and performance analyses demonstrate that the protocol achieves mutual authentication, message integrity, conditional privacy, and traceability with reduced computational and communication overhead compared to existing approaches.