ZKP-Based Lightweight Authentication Protocol During Handovers in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Internet of Vehicles (IoV), as an emerging technology, has attracted much research over the years due to rapid advancements in computing paradigms and vehicular and wireless technologies. These advancements enable vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to offer various services such as traffic management, data exchange, and route scheduling. However, the increase in density and the malicious behaviour of vehicle users have seriously threatened security and privacy concerns in the network. These concerns are related to anonymity, privacy, and verification of the identity of vehicle users. It is crucial to preserve users' privacy to prevent traceability and linkability, besides authentication to track malicious activities in the network. Therefore, in this paper, a novel privacy-preserving lightweight zk-SNARK of polynomial-based authentication protocol is presented. The vehicles are initially registered with a trusted authority (TA) in this protocol. After that, they are authenticated by RSUs, followed by verification of authentication during vehicle handover between RSUs. The proposed protocol is implemented using the Mininet-WiFi tool, and its performance is analyzed by comparing communication latency and computation time for variable vehicular density. An informal security analysis is also done to prove that the proposed protocol provides anonymity, privacy, user verifiability, and untraceability features.