A Robust Authentication Scheme With Continuously Updated Information for Vehicular Sensor Networks

Abstract

Traffic accidents frequently occur due to the mistakes of drivers, and many people are injured or lose their lives in this way. However, with the increasing use of Internet of Things in real applications, vehicle sensor networks (VSNs), which able to address this problem, are becoming an important technology for the safety and convenience of humans. Since the associated messages from VSNs are transmitted via public channels, they are vulnerable to attack, as a result of which many network security measures have been widely studied and applied in this context, including the authentication and key agreement scheme. Existing schemes often adopt the third party as the trusted authority to centrally complete the authentication between the vehicles and roadside units. However, a centralized authentication requires cumbersome processes and significantly relies on the security of the trusted authority. In this case of high-speed vehicles, the authentication scheme must be efficient and practical and this requires that the authentication should be more direct and the computational, and communication overhead for authentication should be as low as possible to enable a real-time response. In this paper, we propose a robust authentication scheme with continuously updated information for VSNs through a decentralized authentication for vehicle-to-roadside unit communication. To the best of our knowledge, our approach is the first to adopt the continuously updated information in the authentication process. As the information is temporary and confidential, this innovation guarantees that vehicles may continue driving without the need to stop for key updates, and also enables the transmitted message to be dynamic and confidential. Through a detailed security and performance analysis, our scheme has been demonstrated to be able to resist various types of attacks and offers an improved tradeoff between security and efficiency compared to other schemes.