A Privacy-Preserving and Scalable Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Vehicles

One of the most important and critical requirements for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is security under strict latency. Typically, authentication protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks need to authenticate themselves frequently. This results in reduced application traffic and increased overhead. Moreover, the mobile nature of vehicles makes them a prime target for physical, side channel, and cloning attacks. To address these issues, this article presents an efficient protocol for authentication in the IoV. The proposed protocol uses physical unclonable functions to provide the desired security characteristics. To reduce the overhead of authentication and improve the throughput of application layer packets, the proposed protocol uses a three-layered infrastructure architecture for IoVs, i.e., roadside units (RSUs), RSU gateways, and trusted authority. A vehicle needs to authenticate only once when it enters the area of an RSU gateway which may engulf multiple RSUs. A performance analysis of the protocol shows that the proposed strategy significantly reduces the number of authentication packets and MAC/PHY overhead while the security analysis demonstrates its robustness against various types of attacks.