A study on a privacy preservation method for VANETs based on certificateless anonymous authentication and non-interactive zero-knowledge proof.

Authors

Zhaowei Hu, Hangyi Quan, ShiYun Ni, Peng He

Published in

PloS one. Volume 21. Issue 10. Pages e0358272. Epub Oct 27, 2026.

Abstract

As a core component of intelligent transportation systems, the security authentication and privacy protection mechanisms in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are of paramount importance. To address key security issues in VANETs, such as the vulnerability of identity privacy to leakage, the complexity of certificate management, the high risk of key escrow, and the challenge of balancing authentication efficiency with security, the paper proposes a privacy-preserving identity authentication and key agreement method based on certificateless public key cryptography (CL-PKC) and non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs (NIZK). This method utilizes a composite identity identifier and combines it with Pedersen commitments to propose a dynamic anonymous identity generation mechanism. It stores static commitments containing identity information on the blockchain, and generates one-time dynamic identities through re-randomization in each authentication process, thereby solving the certificate management issue and achieving anonymity. Furthermore, the method designs an authentication protocol based on CL-PKC and Schnorr NIZK, integrating private key validity verification with dynamic identity verification. A vehicle only needs to construct a single zero-knowledge proof to complete both verifications simultaneously, eliminating the risk of key escrow and improving authentication efficiency and security. For experimental evaluation, the paper constructs a simulation environment based on standard elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and the Ganache blockchain testnet, utilizing benchmark testing data to conduct a comprehensive performance comparison between the proposed method and existing typical authentication methods. Security analysis and experimental evaluation demonstrate that the proposed method satisfies security requirements such as conditional anonymity, unlinkability, and forward security, effectively reduces the system's computational and communication overhead, and is applicable to highly dynamic and resource-constrained VANET environments.

PMID:
42945297
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 28 Oct 2026.

Read full publication at:
Please sign in to see all details.

Stats

1-terrible, 9-excellent. How would you rate this publication? Sign in in to submit your rating.

Post a comment

You need to be signed in to post comments. You can sign in here.

Comments

There are no comments yet.