Provably Secure Drone-Assisted Authentication Protocol for Emergency Rescue in VANETs

After an earthquake or major traffic accident, emergency rescue vehicles may be unable to access the accident site or communicate with the survey drones at the scene. In such cases, an emergency rescue vehicle can select any nearby drone as a communication relay to establish a connection with survey drones at the accident site, thereby forming a drone-assisted Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) to break through geographical constraints. These networks are characterized by flexible deployment, rapid survey, and real-time transmission of rescue data. However, existing authentication protocols for drone-assisted VANETs are insufficient in security and privacy protection, making them vulnerable to side-channel attacks, device capture attacks, and identity impersonation attacks. In addition, the excessively high computational overhead makes it difficult for them to meet the requirements of low latency and high security for real-time communication in emergency rescue. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight drone-assisted emergency rescue authentication protocol based on Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) and the Chebyshev chaotic map. In this protocol, the authenticating entities, including emergency rescue vehicles, relay drones, and survey drones, register with the Trusted Authority (TA) in a symmetric manner and also authenticate each other’s identities and establish session keys symmetrically. The proposed scheme not only resists side-channel attacks and device capture attacks but also addresses the single point of failure problem of relay drones. Both formal and informal security analyses verify its security, and comparative experiments show that it has lower computational and communication overhead, making it more suitable for emergency rescue application scenarios.