SMAD-LDS: enhanced secure message authentication and dissemination with lightweight digital signature in the Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) plays a crucial role in enhancing driver experience and road safety by enabling vehicles to share real-time traffic information. However, the nature of the IoV communication exposes vehicles to potential security risks. Therefore, robust authentication mechanisms are essential to prevent malicious vehicles from disseminating misleading information. Ensuring secure communication in IoV necessitates addressing critical security and privacy requirements, including entity and data authentication, privacy preservation, and confidentiality. Recent research in this area frequently encounters challenges related to high computation and communication overheads, as well as vulnerability to diverse security threats. Consequently, this article proposes secure message authentication and dissemination with lightweight digital signature (SMAD-LDS), a robust message authentication and dissemination scheme incorporating a novel lightweight digital signature technique designed to minimize these overheads. There are four main phases in the proposed SMAD-LDS scheme such as the initiation phase, registration phase, send/receive message phase, and key updating phase. For the registration phase, our results demonstrate that the computation cost in SMAD-LDS is reduced by at least 46.8% compared to other works in the literature. Moreover, the computation overhead in the send/receive messages phase in SMAD-LDS is reduced by at least 94%. Additionally, the overall cost of communications in the proposed article has improved. The cost of communications in the registration phase and send/receive message phase has improved by 28% and 70%, respectively, compared to other works. Furthermore, SMAD-LDS is resistant to known attacks such as modification attacks, impersonation attacks, eavesdropping attacks, fake roadside unit (RSU) attacks, traceability attacks, and replay attacks.