Provably Secure Authentication Protocol for Emergency Vehicles Avoidance in VANETs

In Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), the ability of emergency vehicles (EVs) to reach their destinations quickly can maximize the protection of people’s lives and property safety, and minimize the losses and impacts caused by various emergencies. In this endeavor, the emergency vehicle avoidance protocol is of paramount importance. However, the existing authentication protocol is vulnerable to side-channel attacks, Roadside Units (RSUs) captured attacks, as well as untraceability, etc. Therefore, for wider and more practical realizability, we propose an efficient and secure authentication scheme based on Elliptic Curves Cryptography (ECC), fuzzy extraction algorithm and Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for EVs avoidance. In the protocols, PUF and biometric key are used for protecting RSUs’ and EVs’ privacy information respectively. Additionally, a conditional privacy-preserving and traceable message authentication strategy is designed for emergency messages propagation, the avoidance messages can be forwarded to ordinary vehicles before the EVs arriving. Compared with related EVs avoidance protocols, our protocol can resist side-channel attacks and other various known attacks. In our scheme, the first authentication efficiencies have increased by 11.72% and the subsequent authentication increased by 25.99% than the previous protocols in the same scenario. Security and performance analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure, efficient, and practical.