PUF-based light-weighted anonymous authentication protocol between vehicles and cloud

In the context of vehicle-to-cloud application server communication within the low-altitude economy, a novel vehicle-to-cloud anonymous authentication protocol named PEKE was proposed, which was based on PUF-ECC-Kerberos. The protocol was enhanced by incorporating physical unclonable function (PUF) and integrating the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) public-key encryption algorithm to obtain vehicle pseudonyms. This enabled mutual anonymous authentication and key exchange between vehicles and cloud servers to be achieved. Through formal analysis using the Scyther tool, it was demonstrated that the PEKE protocol not only effectively resisted various security threats such as key leakage, masquerade attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, and reflection attacks, but also ensured the anonymity of vehicle communications in the low-altitude economy, providing robust security guarantees. Furthermore, performance analysis comparisons with other protocols reveal that the PEKE protocol exhibited significant advantages in terms of computational and communication overhead, effectively reducing communication latency and thereby enhancing the overall system efficiency.