Light-Weighted Mutual Authentication and Key Agreement in V2N VANET

As the adoption of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) grows, ensuring secure communication between smart vehicles and remote application servers (APPs) has become a critical challenge. While existing solutions focus on various aspects of security, gaps remain in addressing both high security requirements and the resource-constrained nature of VANET environments. This paper proposes an extended-Kerberos protocol that integrates Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for authentication and key agreement, offering a comprehensive solution to the security challenges in VANETs. The protocol facilitates mutual authentication and secure key agreement between vehicles and APPs, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of vehicle-to-network (V2N) communications and preventing malicious data injection. Notably, by replacing traditional Kerberos password authentication with Challenge-Response Pairs (CRPs) generated by PUF, the protocol significantly reduces the risk of key leakage. The inherent properties of PUF—such as unclonability and unpredictability—make it an ideal defense against physical attacks, including intrusion, semi-intrusion, and side-channel attacks. The results of this study demonstrate that this approach not only enhances security but also optimizes communication efficiency, reduces latency, and improves overall user experience. The analysis proves that our protocol achieves at least 86% improvement in computational efficiency compared to some existed protocols. This is particularly crucial in resource-constrained VANET environments, where it enables efficient data transmission between vehicles and applications, reduces latency, and enhances the overall user experience.