Bilinear pairing-based access control and key agreement scheme for smart transportation

Abstract

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) enabled Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) allows smart vehicles to communicate with other vehicles on road, humans (customers or pedestrians), infrastructure (parking areas, traffic lights etc), Internet, Cloud etc. The vehicles communicate with other entities over wireless open channels directly or indirectly through messages or beacons. Open channel allows various attacks, like replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, fabrication etc., during communication. Also, malicious vehicles can be deployed in the network to misuse or have an unauthorized access to the services. To mitigate these issues, we propose a new remote access control scheme that ensures the secure communication among the vehicles. The vehicles are dynamic in nature in an IoV paradigm, that is, they are not under fixed domains. Therefore, whenever a vehicle changes its location it has to register to the nearest trusted authority (TA) in offline or secured channel mode. To make it applicable, we propose remote registration of the vehicles via the TA. Access control mechanism occurs in two phases: 1) node authentication phase, where vehicles are remotely authenticated by TA and 2) key agreement phase, where after successful mutual authentication they compute a session key by using cryptographic techniques and pre-loaded information. The computed secret session keys are used for ensuring secure communications in future between two vehicles in a cluster as well. Informal security analysis along with formal security verification using the broadly-used Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) show that our access control scheme is secured against various potential attacks. We also show the competency of our scheme by comparing it with other existing schemes in terms of computation and communication costs.