SEBAP: A secure and efficient biometric-assisted authentication protocol using ECC for vehicular cloud computing

Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is an emerging research area of cloud and vehicular networking. It equips vehicles with networking and sensing capacities for vehicle-to-vehicle or vehicle-to-infrastructure communication with available roadside infrastructure. It is significantly utilized in traffic management and road safety using cloud applications. To obtain impressive networking in vehicular communication, there is a need of hybrid technological approach in the form of VCC utilizing vehicular resources, cloud infrastructure, and Internet of Things (IoT) environment. VCC presents smart vehicular communication structure and maintains autonomous traffic, improved vehicle control, and enhanced system security. Security and privacy has appeared to be a major concern in VCC because of involvement of unknown vehicles and infrastructure via public network. In this article, we propose a biometric and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-assisted authentication framework for VCC. The presented framework obtains most of security features and attributes for secure communication in the presence of active and passive attackers. Further, we provide formal security model and its proof, which is based on random oracle model. We compare the performance of our protocol with similar frameworks in the same environment. Our analysis indicates that the presented framework is secure and efficient in terms of communication and computation overheads. As a result, the presented protocol can be utilized in VCC.