A Polynomial Commitment-Driven Zero-Knowledge Proof-Based Authentication of Autonomous Vehicles in Multi-RSU Broadcast Domains

The Internet of Vehicles facilitates seamless Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication, offering a myriad of services ranging from traffic management to data exchange and route scheduling. However, the existence of malicious Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) poses significant security and privacy threats to data communications and vehicle users, respectively. Therefore, it is crucial to verify the identity and preserve the privacy of AVs before offering V2X services within each vehicular broadcast domain. To address the aforementioned issues, a novel privacy-preserving lightweight Fast Reed-Solomon Interactive Oracle Proof of Proximity using polynomial commitment-based authentication protocol is presented. The AVs are initially registered with a trusted authority in this protocol. After that, they are authenticated by roadside units in their respective broadcast domains using a zero-knowledge proof-based challenge-response mechanism. As per the performance analysis, the proposed protocol surpasses state-of-the-art authentication protocols and achieves notable improvements of 19.43% in registration computation time, 50.96% in registration latency, 89.75% in authentication computation time, 14.97% in authentication latency, 97.42% in handover computation time, and 95.84% in handover latency, compared to other protocols. A qualitative security analysis is also carried out to prove that the proposed protocol provides anonymity, privacy, user verifiability, and untraceability features.