iVFAS: An Improved Vehicle-to-Fog Authentication System for Secure and Efficient Fog-based Road Condition Monitoring

Road condition monitoring schemes allow a severe reduction of traffic queues and drastically improve road safety. In these schemes, authorized vehicles communicate the current road condition via a Road Side Unit (RSU) or fog node. The reaction time for these schemes greatly improves in case the RSUs are capable of locally determining the validity of the messages and if relatively low-cost cryptographic operations are involved to ensure the required security features like confidentiality, mutual authentication, anonymity, untraceability, etc. The current literature on vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) does not cover all these mentioned issues profoundly. We show that a recently outperforming scheme called the V2F authentication scheme (VFAS) suffers from several severe issues like no protection against impersonation, traceability, perfect forward secrecy, and ephemeral leakage attacks, no possibility to revoke certificates, scalability problems, and being vulnerable for a semi-trusted third party. We propose an improved scheme, called iVFAS, to address all the required security features and which has better computational, communication, storage and energy consumption performance with respect to most of the related literature, including VFAS. In addition to this, we also evaluated performance under unknown attacks and practical implementation using NS3. Moreover, this new scheme also includes a variant of the Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) certificate scheme in the registration phase, which is resistant to the extended Canetti–Krawczy adversary model.