Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Ensuring the security of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has been a challenging task, particularly due to the high mobility rate of the many elements in the network. With vehicles constantly moving and frequently exchanging data, authentication is crucial for maintaining security. We propose a new approach based on group authentication to handle authentication of several units simultaneously while protecting privacy in an IoV environment. The proposed protocol is designed to perform an authentication and handover process of multiple users within a predefined group. The group authentication based approach ensures privacy of users as the group members' identification is systematically redefined after each group exchange process. Thus, the proposed scheme is designed to offer a promising solution to security challenges within the IoV environment by simultaneously addressing scalability and protecting the privacy of user data. Additionally, our scheme is resistant to various types of attacks, including offline ID attacks, replay attacks, location spoofing attacks, and replay attacks. Comprehensive tests have been conducted and the results are presented in the analysis section, both in terms of the computational cost and the running times, which reveal that the proposed method demonstrates remarkable practicality when compared to the existing approaches.