Physically Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for VANET

The communication between vehicles and other entities occurs over open wireless networks, making them susceptible to various security attacks In Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET). Consequently, many researchers have proposed numerous data transmission and key exchange protocols to ensure secure communication within VANET. The keys and sensitive information involved in these protocols need to be stored long-term in the tamper-resistant devices of vehicles. However, due to the limited resources of these devices, many encryption schemes are difficult to embed. Even if effective encryption schemes can be embedded in VANET, the long-term storage of data in vehicles still carries a significant risk of being attacked. To tackle this problem, we propose an authentication protocol designed for VANET that emphasizes both physical security and privacy protection. The protocol primarily leverages the properties of Physical Unclonable Functions to achieve enhanced security. This approach eliminates the need for vehicles to store keys and sensitive messages long-term, reducing the storage burden on vehicles while enhancing the system's security and efficiency. Detailed security analyses demonstrate that our proposed scheme achieves the goals of physical security and privacy protection. A comparison with similar approaches demonstrates that our solution outperforms them in both time efficiency and communication overhead.