LIAS: A Lightweight Incentive Authentication Scheme for Forensic Services in IoV

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become an indispensable data sensing and processing platform in Internet of Things (IoT) for intelligent transportation. The mounted cameras on the vehicles along with the fixed roadside cameras are utilized to provide pictorial services for IoV users and law enforcement agencies. For such forensic services, ensuring the security and privacy of vehicles while guaranteeing the efficiency of data transmission among vehicles is important. In this paper, we propose a lightweight incentive authentication scheme (LIAS) for forensic services in IoV. LIAS is developed on a three-tier architecture containing cloud layer, fog layer, and user layer. LIAS uses pairing-free certificateless signcryption, pseudonym update mechanism, and incentive mechanism to realize a secure anonymous authentication efficiently. We conduct correctness and security analysis, as well as performance analysis and evaluation to validate the high security and efficiency of LIAS. Experimental results reveal that, the communication and computation overheads as well as the message delay and packet loss of LIAS are much lower than those of state-of-the-art techniques. Note to Practitioners—This paper is motivated by the security and privacy issues of forensic services in IoV for intelligent transportation. Our goal is to improve the security and privacy of vehicles while guaranteeing the lightweight and incentive of data transmission among the vehicles. Fog-assisted IoV is introduced to fully utilize the capacities of near-user edge devices as well as the connections between fog nodes and devices. However, it still faces the difficulties in ensuring vehicles’ security and privacy. Moreover, vehicles’ information dissemination could be easily monitored because of the unavoidable defect of wireless communication. Thereby, it is essential to guarantee the security and privacy of vehicles while enhancing the efficiency of vehicles’ data transmission during the forensic service. To this end, this paper proposes a lightweight conditional anonymous authentication scheme for forensic services in IoV, which is developed based on the pairing-free technique to achieve secure anonymous authentication with high efficiency. This paper also designs a user tracing mechanism, incentive mechanism, and pseudonym update mechanism to realize safe and effective forensic service in IoV.