RSAKA-VDT: Designing Reliable and Provably Secure Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme for Vehicular Digital Twin Networks

The vehicular digital twin (VDT) networks are an emerging network paradigm that are facilitating connected and autonomous vehicles. However, autonomous vehicles transmit real-time sensing privacy data to their corresponding digital twin representations through public communication channels within VDT intra-twin communication, thus exposing this communication to various threats of attack and potential data tampering. On this basis, a reliable and efficient data transmission scheme is urgently needed to ensure secure fine-grained data access control. In this context, this article introduced a new authenticated key agreement scheme, termed RSAKA-VDT, to authenticate user identity and enable confidential service data access. In particular, only vehicle users with proper access permissions are allowed to calculate the shared session key. The associated VDTs are deployed on the network edge in the suggested RSAKA-VDT. Identity authentication and session key negotiation are carried out between an autonomous vehicle user and the affiliated edge server. Subsequently, the generated session key encrypts real-time privacy data, ensuring secure data exchange for VDT intra-twin communication. Furthermore, we validated the security features of RSAKA-VDT using the random oracle model, heuristic security analysis, and the “automated validation of Internet security protocols and applications” (AVISPA) software tool. Finally, we conducted a comparative analysis of RSAKA-VDT against six closely related user authentication schemes, evaluating security functionality attributes, computational costs, and communication overheads. Comparative performance results show that RSAKA-VDT meets all 18 security evaluation criteria while maintaining a better balance between practical usability and requirements for security functionality.