Privacy-Preserving Authentication Based on PUF for VANETs

The secret key is stored in an ideal tamper-proof device so that a vehicle can implement a secure authentication with the road-side units (RSUs) and other drivers. However, some adversaries can capture the secret key by physical attacks. To resist physical attacks, we propose a physical-preserving authentication based on a physical unclonable function for vehicular ad hoc networks. In the proposed scheme, a physical unclonable function is deployed on the vehicle and the RSU to provide a challenge–response mechanism. A secret key is only generated by the challenge–response mechanism when it is needed, which eliminates the need to store a long-term secret key. As a result, this prevents secret keys from being captured by adversaries, improving system security. In addition, route planning is introduced into the proposed scheme so that a vehicle can obtain the authentication key of RSUs on its route before vehicle-to-infrastructure authentication, which greatly speeds up the authentication when the vehicle enters the RSUs’ coverage. Furthermore, a detailed analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme achieves security objectives in vehicular ad hoc networks. Ultimately, when contrasted with similar schemes, the performance assessment demonstrates that our proposed scheme surpasses others in terms of computational overhead, communication overhead and packet loss rate.