Privacy-Preserving Quick Authentication in Fast Roaming Networks

Vehicular networks will become an important component for information accesses in one’s daily life. A vehicular net-work provides a vehicular user not only chances to communi-cate with peer vehicles but also to use Internet through road-side access points (APs). During a trip a vehicular user could roam across multiple APs either belong to their home wireless domain or to domains owned by different authorities. This poses challenges on privacy and network performance to the current public wireless network access protocols. In this pa-per we explore an idea that shifts the paradigm of authen-tication that goes back to home networks to a paradigm of authentication that performs at the APs. We propose three authentication schemes in realizing the idea. These schemes are designed for preserving user’s identity and location pri-vacy. They also greatly reduce response time for authentica-tion when roaming. The paper then analyzes the security and privacy properties of these schemes as well as the efficiency of them.