Periodic Identity Verification of RSU Using Fiat-Shamir Non-Interactive ZKP in SDVN

Road-Side Units (RSUs) are deployed along the road to facilitate Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication, a critical component of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) services. However, the presence of rogue RSUs, which are unauthorized access points, poses significant threats to V2X communications and safety applications. These rogue RSUs, installed by adversaries, can mimic legitimate RSUs and establish connections with vehicles, enabling various attacks such as data interception, spoofing, and denial of service. Therefore, Software-defined Networking (SDN) has been leveraged to employ various traffic engineering, network management, and secure verification of RSUs and vehicle functionalities. The SDN controller (SDNC), which manages RSUs, can periodically verify their identity. This mechanism ensures the association of vehicles with legitimate RSUs and the detection of rogue RSUs. To periodically verify the RSUs' identity, a novel Fiat-Shamir Transformation-enabled Non-Interactive Zero-knowledge Proof (<tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\text{Z K P}$</tex>) -based identity verification mechanism has been proposed. The RSUs are initially registered with an SDNC in this protocol. Subsequently, SDNC verifies their identity periodically using a unique ZKP-based challenge-response mechanism. As per the performance and security analysis, the proposed protocol surpasses state-of-the-art authentication protocols and achieves notable improvements.