Secure and Efficient Lightweight Protocol for Emergency Vehicle Avoidance Based on Cloud

With the increased number of vehicles, infrastructure, and demand for various road services, the traditional Internet of Vehicles (IoV) architecture fails to provide quality services to users. New frameworks combining the vehicular network with cloud computing to extend storage capacity and processing power are highly sought. The vehicles communicate with the roadside units (RSUs) and upload the road condition information to the cloud server, enabling dynamic resource scheduling. However, in practical applications, the authentication scheme for emergency vehicles as a special node in the vehicle network receives insufficient attention. This article proposes a multi-factor lightweight emergency vehicle authentication protocol for cloud environments. Our protocol enables mutual authentication among the vehicle, the RSU, and the cloud server. An essential feature of our scheme is that during the initial authentication process, the cloud server generates random temporary secrets for the emergency vehicle and subsequent RSUs on the planned route. During the re-authentication phase, the vehicles and RSUs are authenticated using temporary secrets, improving the efficiency. In addition, our protocol verifies the driver's identity and prevents the system from impersonation attacks and vehicle theft attacks. Extensive simulation comparisons and security analyses demonstrate that our protocol is more effective.