A secure and efficient authentication scheme in the Internet of Vehicle communication

Significant technological advancements in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) incentivize the rapid development of various vehicular communication technologies for wireless connectivity among vehicles, roadside devices, and pedestrians. Despite the countless benefits, security issues have received considerable critical attention since breaches have been recurrent in vehicular communication networks and applications, which seriously affects the transportation environment. To resolve the security issues in vehicular communication, we introduce a novel signature scheme based on a standard elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) algorithm in this paper. Compared with existing schemes, the proposed scheme is lightweight and cost-saving in the vehicular environment and can efficiently authenticate and protect the exchange of messages between each entity in the IoV. The security of our scheme is based on the unsolved NP-complete problem: the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem. Moreover, by using key prefixing, we demonstrate the merits of our scheme through security analysis in terms of avoiding key escrow and replacement attack resistance.