Physical Unclonable Function Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Autonomous Vehicles Using Hardware...

Area of Science:

• Cybersecurity
• Smart City Technology
• Automotive Engineering

Background:

• Smart cities leverage the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) for efficient urban management and transportation safety.
• Increased connectivity in IoVs raises significant security and privacy concerns for autonomous vehicles (AVs).

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a novel privacy-preserving authentication scheme for AVs within the IoV architecture.
• To enhance the security of IoV systems against cyber threats like identity fraud and man-in-the-middle attacks.

Main Methods:

• Utilized physical unclonable functions (PUFs) for generating random secret keys for AV authentication.
• Implemented a bilinear pairing-based encryption technique supporting secure searches over encrypted data.
• Employed hardware acceleration using Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) for efficient data handling.

Main Results:

• The proposed PUF design ensures true randomness for AV user secret keys, enhancing security.
• The authentication scheme demonstrated high reliability (over 98.5%) and strong distinguishability (uniqueness near 49.9%) across various conditions.
• Hardware implementation on FPGA platforms showed low resource utilization (e.g., <80% LUTs), confirming feasibility and efficiency.

Conclusions:

• The developed authentication framework effectively addresses security and privacy challenges in IoV environments.
• The integration of PUFs and advanced encryption provides a robust solution for securing autonomous vehicles.
• The hardware-efficient design is suitable for practical deployment in smart city infrastructure.