A Lightweight Authentication and Attestation Scheme for In-Transit Vehicles in IoV Scenario

With the rise of new technological paradigms such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), we are going to see an unprecedented growth of connected vehicles on the roads. Also, with the ever-increasing complexity of vehicular electronics and with the increasing number of Electronic Control Units (ECUs) inside these next-generation vehicles, the need for verification of the firmware and software running on these ECUs using attestation techniques is heightened all the more. In this paper, we propose a lightweight and secure authentication and attestation scheme for attesting vehicles while they are on the roads. Since this attestation is proposed to be carried out on moving vehicles, there is also a need for authenticating the vehicles with the Road Side Units (RSUs) first before carrying out attestation. Therefore, a combined attestation and authentication scheme for verification of the vehicle ECU firmware is presented here. The ECU firmware running on the vehicles can be attested from the edge servers connected to the RSUs while the vehicles are in-transit and passing through these RSUs. We perform a security analysis of the proposed attestation and authentication protocol and compare it with other similar existing protocols. We also do a performance analysis of the proposed protocol and show the feasibility of its deployment. This work was partially supported in part by the SICI SICRG grant received by Dr. Vinay Chamola for the project Artificial Intelligence Enabled Security Provisioning and Vehicular Vision innovations for Autonomous Vehicles. The review of this article was coordinated by Prof. Liehuang Zhu. (Corresponding author: Mohsen Guizani.) Tejasvi Alladi and Sombuddha Chakravarty are with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, BITS-Pilani, Pilani 333031, India (e-mail: p20170433@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in; f2016165@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in).