Unleashing the Potential of Metaverse in Social IoV: An Authentication Protocol Based on Blockchain

As a model for the next generation of the Internet, the metaverse—a fully immersive, hyper-temporal virtual shared space—is transitioning from imagination to reality. At present, the metaverse has been widely applied in a variety of fields, including education, social entertainment, Internet of vehicles (IoV), healthcare, and virtual tours. In IoVs, researchers primarily focus on using the metaverse to improve the traffic safety of vehicles, while paying limited attention to passengers’ social needs. At the same time, Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) introduces the concept of social networks in IoV to provide better resources and services for users. However, the problem of single interaction between SIoV and users has become increasingly prominent. In this paper, we first introduce a SIoV environment combined with the metaverse. In this environment, we adopt blockchain as the platform of the metaverse to provide a decentralized environment. Concerning passengers’ social data may contain sensitive/private information, we then design an authentication and key agreement protocol called MSIoV-AKA to protect the communications. Through formal security verifications in the real-or-random (ROR) model and using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool, we firmly verify the security of the protocol. Finally, detailed comparisons are made between our protocol and robust protocols/schemes in terms of computational cost and communication cost. In addition, we implement the MSIoV-AKA protocol in the Ethereum test network and Hyperledger Sawtooth to show the practicality.