A Lightweight Biometric-based User Authentication Protocol for Self-driving Vehicles

With the adoption of intelligent transportation systems, there is a rapid migration from traditional driver-based vehicles to self-driving vehicles, which have become open to the cyber world, and therefore, vulnerable to several attacks. Among existing security measures like mutual vehicular authentication, secure communication channels, and intrusion detection systems, there is a severe lack of attention to the user-to-vehicle authentication aspect, which represents a primary security barrier against vehicular attacks. In this paper, a secure and lightweight biometric-based user-to-vehicle authentication protocol is proposed to prevent unauthorized access to vehicles' systems and vehicular communications by extension. Through formal and informal security analysis, the proposed protocol has demonstrated a good performance in terms of resistance to well-known attacks while achieving lower computational and communication overheads compared to the related methods.