CLAM: lightweight certificateless anonymous authentication mechanism for vehicular cloud services

Vehicular cloud service (VCS) is proposed to accelerate computation and storage by integrating conventional cloud services into vehicular networks. Vehicle authentication is one of the critical security challenges in the widespread deployment of VCS. The high dynamicity of vehicles and the limited resources of Vehicular networks necessitate the lower overhead not only in computation and communication but also in storage during the authentication process. This paper considers the mutual authentication between vehicle and road side unit (RSU) in the scenario where a vehicle accesses VCS via RSU. We propose a lightweight certificateless anonymous authentication mechanism (CLAM), which applies Ring-Learning-with-Errors-based password-authenticated key exchange technique. CLAM could defend against a variety of attacks while preserving the identity and location privacy of vehicles. Moreover, CLAM is lightweight in terms of small overhead in communication, computation and storage. We detail the mechanism, explain how CLAM satisfies the security requirements and apply SVO logic to verify that CLAM meets the desired authentication objectives. Simulations are also carried out to evaluate CLAM’s efficiency in terms of vehicle authentication time, by comparison with the existing authentication mechanisms.