Comments on "An Efficient and Provably Secure Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Fog-Based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks"

Vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have experienced rapid growth due to the advancement of cloud computing, IoT technologies, and intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Vehicles are required to have enhanced storage capacity, onboard computing capabilities, improved sensing power, and communication systems. To address real-world demands like low latency, affordable storage, and mobility in VANET deployments, There have been efforts to integrate fog computing with VANETs in a practical implementation. "An Efficient and Provably Secure Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for Fog-Based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks" was proposed by Ma et al. (IEEE Internet of Things Journal, pp 8065–8075, 10.1109/JIOT.2019.2902840). According to their claims, the use of their secure authentication technique can help prevent security threats. However, after careful investigation, we discovered that their authentication protocol is susceptible to vehicle user impersonation attacks and also does not provide vehicle anonymity. In light of this, we have provided some recommendations to address the current flaws in the protocol developed by Ma et al.