PUF-Based Privacy-Preserving Simultaneous Authentication among Multiple Vehicles in VANET

The intellectual and immense attainment of a smart city and auto-mobile vehicles are gradually growing. This growth drives Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET), a broadly operated complex network for inter-vehicular transmission to acquire information relevant to the vehicle location, road condition, traffic congestion, and speed. Generally, this information is procured through an open-source communication, which is susceptible to various security threats. In broad terms, the privacy of data in VANET is considered an imperative task. In this regard, many authentication protocols are formerly initiated for VANET. Most of these protocols are precarious owing to eavesdropping, replay, and impersonation attacks, etc. Furthermore, most existing protocols operates on enormous communication and computation rate, which turns them inadequate for VANET. This paper exhibits a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication protocol for $n$ number of vehicles in VANET using the physical unclonable function (PUF) technique, and offers efficient and secure communication via public channels. Moreover, we evaluate our protocol formally and informally, showing that it is scalable, lightweight, and safe compared to formerly protocols. The rate of computation and communication is less than most related protocols. We also simulate the proposed scheme using the NS-3 simulator to measure its various network performance parameters. As a result, it is apparent through the beheld statistics that the presented protocol is beyond practical, efficient, and reliable for the secure dissemination of information in VANET.