A Distributed Lightweight PUF-Based Mutual Authentication Protocol for IoV

In recent times, the advent of innovative technological paradigms like the Internet of Things has paved the way for numerous applications that enhance the quality of human life. A remarkable application of IoT that has emerged is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), motivated by an unparalleled surge of connected vehicles on the roads. IoV has become an area of significant interest due to its potential in enhancing traffic safety as well as providing accurate routing information. The primary objective of IoV is to maintain strict latency standards while ensuring confidentiality and security. Given the high mobility and limited bandwidth, vehicles need to have rapid and frequent authentication. Securing Vehicle-to-Roadside unit (V2R) and Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications in IoV is essential for preventing critical information leakage to an adversary or unauthenticated users. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel mutual authentication protocol which incorporates hardware-based security primitives, namely physically unclonable functions (PUFs) with Multi-Input Multi-Output (MIMO) physical layer communications. The protocol allows a V2V and V2R to mutually authenticate each other without the involvement of a trusted third-party (server). The protocol design effectively mitigates modeling attacks and impersonation attempts, where the accuracy of predicting the value of each PUF response bit does not exceed 54%, which is equivalent to a random guess.