Secure blockchain-based IoV architecture integrated with PUFs for secure vehicular communication

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are now an integral part of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANET), which are transformed into Electric Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (EVANET), an intelligent transportation network. Secure authentication and communication play vital roles in creating trusted communication environment. Existing infrastructure and frameworks have several bottlenecks, such as security vulnerabilities, high computation and communication costs, high storage overhead, and multiple interactions. This paper presents a layered architecture for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to overcome the existing limitations. Blockchain technology is integrated with Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and bloom filters to establish secure registration and authentication of network components. A PUFs-based token has also been created for fast authentication handover to support the dynamic nature of vehicular networks. Device-to-Vehicle (D2V) is also optimised to reduce the computation and communication cost through PUFs and Message Hash Authentication (MHA). A novel Blockchain-based BAN (BBAN) also proposed to validate the proposed architecture. The proposed system's resistance is also validated against potential security attacks. The D2V computation cost is improved by 14.16%, the computation cost for Electric Vehicle to Roadside Unit (EV2RSU) initial authentication is enhanced by 87.96%, and handover authentication by 74.36 %. Storage cost is also greatly reduced by 40.65%, lowering the communication cost for handover authentication in EV2RSU by 18%, proving the effectiveness and supremacy of the proposed architecture.