The concept of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) played an important role for the improvements that happened in the smart transportation field. Nowadays, it is one of the hot topics in academia, automotive sector, industry, and research. The message transfer between the vehicles or infrastructures are necessary for communication in a vehicular network. A public channel is used for all these types of communication, which offers adversary to get a chance to delete, modify, insert, and extract data. Similar to security, lightweight property is yet another important factor needed to be considered thoroughly because of the highly dynamic nature of IoVs. In the state-of-the-art, several schemes are designed separately for security and lightweight property; however, we have only a small number of works that discussed the importance of maintaining a balance between these two criteria. Among them all schemes use a secure medium for the registration process. Different from them, we used a public channel, which makes our scheme more vulnerable to attacks than the state-of-the-art. In this paper, we designed a lightweight, secure authentication and key agreement scheme (LightKey), which is strong enough to resist different types of attacks and at the same time lightweight as well. In particular, LightKey is resistant to replay, man-in-the-middle, impersonation, physical capture, session key disclosure, perfect forward secrecy, backward secrecy, and ephemeral secret leakage attacks. We have simulated LightKey in Scyther (automated security protocol verification tool) and proved that it is secure against the above mentioned attacks. The performance analysis results show that LightKey takes 10% less computation cost than most related competitive scheme, which makes it to fit in the On-Board Unit (OBU) of any vehicles easily.

The sensing and communication capabilities of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) allow for the design of safer Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), with capabilities for reduced crashes and drivers' injuries. To this aim, entities in the IoV can autonomously exchange Warning Messages (WMs) on the road status to help drivers, passengers, and vehicles to take immediate actions and reduce road accidents. WMs authentication, timely propagation, and integrity is a fundamental requirement, as the injection of false WMs or their delay by a malicious user can lead to accidents or traffic congestion. The currently available WMs authentication and propagation schemes focus on the security properties, without however accounting for the scalability issues related to the large number of entities connected in the IoV. In this paper, we propose Secure Warning Message Authentication and Propagation (SWAP), an authentication protocol specifically designed for WM propagation in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). We introduce the Warning Message Authority (WMA), a novel entity responsible for secure WMs handling. Thanks to the WMA, WMs are managed by dedicated resources that allow for the timely delivery of safety-critical information, avoiding delays due to network congestion at the Trusted Authority (TA). We prove the security of SWAP by using the Random Oracle Model (ROM) and via security analysis. Compared to state of the art authentication schemes, SWAP reduces the number of communication bits by 100 bits, and provides a ten-fold decrease of the computation time.

Autonomous message propagation in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) need to be secure to guarantee safety. In fact, a malicious user propagating false information may cause accidents impacting on the safety of both vehicles and drivers. Authentication should however account for the time-critical nature of messages impacting the vehicles behavior. Furthermore, it should account for the resource-limited nature of vehicles. Currently available authentication protocols fail in providing a secure and lightweight solution in terms of computation time, communication cost, and storage cost. Furthermore, as we later show, they are vulnerable to multiple attacks.In this paper, we propose Method for Lightweight and Secure Communication (MeLSeC), a novel lightweight and secure authentication scheme for IoV. Compared to state-of-the-art authentication solutions, MeLSeC is resistant to a larger number of attacks. We test MeLSeC against multiple attacks using Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols (AVISPA), and show its higher security guarantees against other relevant state-of-the-art solutions. By comparing it with other relevant state-of-the-art solutions, we show that MeLSeC provides up to 700 times smaller computation costs on a desktop computer and up to 4 times smaller computation cost on Raspberry Pi. Furthermore, MeLSeC reduces the joint communication and storage costs by up to 7 times.