PPA6-IoV: A Six-Step Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol for the Internet of Vehicles

Today, vehicular communication can significantly improve traffic safety and road efficiency and as well as reduce the environmental pollution. The internet of vehicles (IoV) provides a communication platform between vehicles in intercity roads and streets of a city. Various messages such as safety messages and road traffic services can be transferred among objects of the platform including vehicles, Road Side Units (RSU), pedestrians, cloud's servers and Trusted Authority (TA). To trust the messages and their initiators in IoV, the authentication mechanism is inevitable. On the other hand, vehicles insist on privacy preserving due to their security and safety. Therefore, an authentication mechanism between agents of IoV, which guarantees privacy preserving, is a hot topic in the research domain of IoV. This paper proposes a novel six-step authentication protocol, which is called PPA6-IoV, between vehicles such that the privacy of both initiator vehicle and receipt vehicle is preserved. During the authentication protocol, the session key for secure communication between two vehicles is established. The Crossware ARM simulator along with NS2 simulator is used to evaluate and compare the performance of PPA6-IoV with previous state-of-the-art techniques. Simulation results show that PPA6-IoV on average has 39% and 91% less communication and computational costs, respectively compared to previous state-of-the-art techniques. The results demonstrate that PPA6-IoV provides a proper level of both security and efficiency.