Biometric-Based Lightweight V2I Authentication and Key Exchange Protocol

With the swift progress and wide application of Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) technology, a massive number of vehicles have been integrated into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) ecosystem. To access IoV services, vehicles increasingly engage in frequent vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. During the driving process, vehicles must undergo authentication with Roadside Units (RSUs), where only verified legitimate identities are granted access to IoV services. However, the limited computational resources of RSUs often lead to authentication delays in vehicle-RSU interactions. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a biometric-based lightweight V2I authentication and key exchange protocol. In this scheme, after a vehicle completes initial authentication with the nearest RSU, it performs mutual authentication with subsequent RSUs based on the initial authentication, thereby avoiding redundant computations. The proposed scheme combines biometric technology and a two-stage authentication mechanism to ensure that the computational complexity of each entity is reduced without compromising security. This paper verifies the security of the solution through security analysis. In addition, performance analysis proves that compared with other solutions, this solution shows clear benefits when it comes to computational and communication costs.