Lightweight Continuous Authentication Protocol for Vehicles in Vehicular Networks

Cloud-edge computing for the Internet of vehicle (CEIoV) can support real-time access and service requests of large-scale vehicles. In order to ensure the security of its internal resources, vehicle identity usually needs to be validated before it can access CEIoV. However, because the vehicle itself is in the running state and moreover its computing, storage and communication resources are limited, the existing identity authentication protocol cannot be directly applied to authenticate a running vehicle in CEIoV. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight continuous authentication (LCA) protocol to realize vehicle authentication and guarantee the security of CEIoV internal resources. LCA is designed based on chameleon Hash function, whose implementation requires simple cryptographic operations and is easy to be deployed on the resource-limited devices. By using random oracle model, the semantic security of LCA is proved strictly. At the same time, the experimental results show that LCA has lower computational and communication costs in the continuous authentication process compared with prior schemes. © 2024 Chinese Institute of Electronics. All rights reserved.