UMAPE: A UAV-Assisted Secure Mutual Authentication Protocol Using Edge-Computing for Enhanced IoV Systems

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), facilitated by vehicle communication devices, provides a plethora of applications, including traffic alerts and real-time updates, within intelligent transportation systems. Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) allows IoV to reach new heights, offering benefits such as reduced infrastructure load, rapid emergency response, resource management, and enhanced network performance. Yet, this interconnected world faces substantial security and performance challenges, especially in ensuring secure authentication and efficiency and protecting user privacy. To address these concerns, this paper proposes UMAPE, a secure and efficient authentication protocol assisted by UAVs in an IoV environment. The UMAPE employs elliptic curve cryptography with a hash function to ensure lightweight, more secure and efficient authentication between vehicles, UAVs and the Road Side Units (RSUs), which act as an edge node with admissible overhead. For security, a formal security proof using a random oracle model, which proves the robustness of the session key, and a formal security verification by the Scyther simulation tool. Furthermore, a performance evaluation is performed to assess the efficiency of the protocol, and the findings indicate that the UMAPE reduced computation and energy overhead with, on average, fewer 45.80% computation and 45.05% energy overhead compared to state-of-the-art solutions.