A Provable and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for UAV-Enabled Intelligent Transportation Systems

In this article, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play a key role in improving the safety and reliability of transportation systems, particularly where data traffic is nonhomogeneous and nonstationary. However, heterogeneous data sharing raises plenty of security and privacy concerns, which may keep UAVs out of future intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Some of the well-known security and privacy issues in the UAV-enabled ITS ecosystem include tracking UAVs and vehicle locations, unauthorized access to data, and message modification. Therefore, in this article, we contribute to the sum of knowledge by combining the hyperelliptic curve cryptography (HECC) techniques, digital signature, and hash function to present a privacy-preserving authentication scheme. The security features of the proposed scheme are assessed using formal security analysis methods, i.e., real-or- random (ROR) oracle model. To examine the performance of the proposed scheme, a comparison with other existing schemes has been carried out. The results reveal that the proposed scheme outperforms its counterpart schemes in terms of computation and communication costs.