A Lightweight Identity Authentication Protocol for Vehicle Ad Hoc Network Based on PUF-Obfuscation

Area of Science:

• Computer Science
• Cybersecurity
• Networking

Background:

• Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) require secure Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication.
• Existing Physical Unclonable Function (PUF)-based authentication schemes face modeling vulnerabilities and high overheads.

Purpose of the Study:

• To propose a decentralized, dynamic, and anonymous authentication protocol for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs).
• To enhance security against machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) attacks while ensuring efficiency.

Main Methods:

• Integration of Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) with Self-Adaption Deviation Locking PUFs (SDL PUFs).
• Implementation of a dynamic Challenge-Response Pair (CRP) obfuscation mechanism.
• Formal security verification using the Real-or-Random (ROR) model and AVISPA tool.
• Performance evaluation using SUMO and Omnetpp simulations.

Main Results:

• Reduced ML/DL attack prediction success rate by approximately 35% compared to raw SDL PUFs.
• Achieved low computational overhead (6.77 ms per entity) and communication cost (192 bytes).
• Ensured identity untraceability and forward secrecy.

Conclusions:

• The proposed protocol offers superior robustness against advanced modeling attacks in V2X environments.
• The protocol is efficient and suitable for resource-constrained VANETs, improving V2X communication security and performance.