A Mutual Authentication Scheme for Secure Fog Computing Service Handover in Vehicular Network Environment

Handover schemes play a vital role on fog computing service (FCS) provided through vehicular network. It not only determines the quality of services (QoSs) but also the security and safety of vehicular network system against adversaries. As a part of handover process, authentication between vehicles and a new fog node (FN) significantly contributes to protecting private information and infrastructure of vehicular network at once. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and secure mutual authentication scheme for handover process considering limited access FCS in the vehicular network environment and also service reservation scenario at login and service request phase. In the proposed scheme, mutual authentication process is assisted by a cloud server (CS) during login and service request phase in which CS distributes the credentials for on-the-road authentication between the vehicles and FN installed on road side unit (RSU). We demonstrate that our proposed scheme is lightweight due to employing one-way hash function and exclusive-or operation extensively. In addition, our scheme is efficient in terms of computational cost as well as computation cost. We show that our scheme achieves 1.1-56.67 times faster computation and also reduces the total message size by 30%-58.21% in comparison with the previous authentication schemes in the most relevant environment. The informal and formal security analyses show that this authentication scheme can protect the secrecy of transactions of all interacting entities against various known attacks. In addition, validation using SPAN software based on AVISPA also confirms that the proposed authentication scheme can satisfy mutual authentication goal and, at the same time, also protect against replay and man-in-the-middle attack.