A UAV-Assisted Authentication Protocol for Internet of Vehicles

As a component of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is becoming increasingly important in the management and construction of urban transportation as it can provide users with a range of applications related to traffic accident warnings, entertainment information, collaborative driving and real-time road information through communication devices on vehicles. However, with the increasing variety of services in the IoV, the growing demand for user traffic and the advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology, UAV is introduced into the IoV as a solution, which can relieve the pressure on the communication infrastructure in the network, provide emergency communication services and improve the performance of network services. Due to the openness of IoV and the high-speed movement of vehicles, authentication and privacy issues are among the most pressing issues in IoV. Therefore, the paper proposes a secure and effective authentication protocol for UAV-assisted IoV. The protocol utilises elliptic curve cryptography to assure the security of the authentication. The protocol undergoes proof of security, Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic analysis and informal security analysis to ensure secure and mutual authentication, and have a good resistance to known attacks. Furthermore, performance analysis and comparison are conducted to evaluate the efficiency of our protocol. The results indicate that our protocol has superior advantages in overhead.