Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

1-2026

Abstract

To ensure the legitimacy of communicators while ad dressing the privacy concerns of vehicles in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) schemes have been proposed. Given that existing schemes suffer from single point of failure due to centralized authorities, several distributed CPPA schemes have been proposed. However, these schemes all ignore the tight cementation between system secret keys and the authority, which could be a serious threat to system security, that the compromised authority may leak the system secret key. To address these issues, we propose a security enhanced decentralized conditional privacy-preserving authentication (DCPPA) scheme. DCPPA first introduces a decentralized system master key generation (DSMKG) mechanism without a centralized secret sharer, ensuring that the system secret key remains hidden from any single authority. Based on DSMKG, DCPPA then implements a lightweight verifiable pseudonym self-generation strategy without the system master secret key escrow problem, thus providing flexible pseudonym updating and reliable de-anonymization. Moreover, we implement DCPPA over a hyperelliptic curve cryptosystem (HECC) to balance the system performance. Considering the additional communication processes due to the decentralized feature, we introduce a symmetric balanced incomplete block design (SBIBD) to enhance the communication efficiency. We demonstrate the excellent security of DCPPA through an in-depth security analysis, while demonstrate that the overhead of DCPPA is at ms level through experiments.

Keywords

Conditional privacy-preserving authentication, decentralized system master key generation, pseudonym self-generation, symmetric balanced incomplete block design, VANETs

Discipline

Information Security

Publication

IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing

First Page

1

Last Page

16

ISSN

1545-5971

Identifier

10.1109/TDSC.2026.3667807

Publisher

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1109/TDSC.2026.3667807

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