Fog-based low latency and lightweight authentication protocol for vehicular communication

Fog-based vehicular communication has received a huge interest due to rise in vehicular traffic and numerous services, like transferring messages among vehicles in an emergency and other scenarios. Secure storage, password protection, authorization, accessibility, and an authentic summary of the data flow are required in existing centralized approach. Conventional approaches process data at the servers, which affects network latency and throughput. Transferring data from edge devices to a centralized server increases the risk of being hacked, which results in corrupted data and data destruction. Nonetheless, conventional fog-based protocols are susceptible to various threats and proved inefficient in terms of computation and communication cost. In this article, we propose a secure and robust authentication protocol for fog-based vehicular communication. Moreover, the formal security verification using Random Oracle Model and commonly used software, Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications and informal analysis represent that our proposed protocol is secure against man-in-the-middle and replay attacks. The performance comparison shows that the protocol addresses added security features with the least possible latency, computation, communication, and storage cost compared to the state-of-the-art protocols. As a result, our proposed protocol's high-security features indicate its robustness and make it feasible for practical application.