Hardware Acceleration-Based Privacy-Aware Authentication Scheme for Internet of Vehicles Using Physical Unclonable...

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity
• Transportation Engineering

Background:

• Smart cities leverage the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) for advanced urban management and transportation efficiency.
• The IoV enables wireless communication for traffic data exchange, enhancing safety but raising user privacy concerns.
• Authentication of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is critical for secure IoV operations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose an innovative privacy-preserving authentication scheme for AVs within the IoV framework.
• To enhance security against cyber-attacks like identity fraud and man-in-the-middle attacks.
• To evaluate the scheme's performance, security, and hardware resource utilization.

Main Methods:

• Developed a novel authentication scheme using physical unclonable functions (PUFs) for secure key generation.
• Integrated the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) encryption technique with multi-multi searching capabilities.
• Implemented the scheme using hardware acceleration on a Nexys A7-100T FPGA board for efficient processing.

Main Results:

• The proposed scheme effectively authenticates AVs while preserving user privacy and protecting against cyber threats.
• Encryption time increases non-linearly with AV ID size (5μs to 39μs for 100-800 bits).
• Search time increases linearly with AV ID size (under 1μs to 8μs for 100-800 bits) with minimal hardware resource utilization (e.g., 25% DSP, 22.2% BRAM).

Conclusions:

• The PUF-based authentication scheme offers a robust, privacy-preserving solution for IoV systems.
• The hardware acceleration ensures efficient performance with low communication and computational overhead.
• The scheme successfully balances security, privacy, and resource efficiency for autonomous vehicle authentication.