SecTwin: A secure and efficient authentication mechanism for vehicular digital twins

Abstract

As vehicular digital twin (VDT) networks continue to evolve, ensuring secure and efficient communication between physical vehicles and their digital counterparts is crucial. Traditional authentication protocols rely on computationally intensive cryptographic techniques, leading to increased latency and resource consumption in real-time vehicular environments. To address these challenges, this paper proposes SecTwin, a lightweight authentication mechanism designed specifically for VDT networks. SecTwin leverages TinyJAMBU authenticated encryption and hash-based authentication to establish a secure and resource-efficient communication framework between autonomous vehicles and their DTs. By integrating lightweight cryptographic techniques and secure key management, SecTwin enhances the security and efficiency of VDT networks, paving the way for reliable and safe autonomous vehicle communication. The informal demonstrates that SecTwin is resilient against key security threats, including replay attacks, impersonation, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Moreover, formal security analysis using the random oracle model and Scyther shows SecTwin is secure. Additionally, performance evaluations reveal that SecTwin reduces communication cost by 51.22%, to 52.38% and execution time by 63.29% to 82.63%, making it highly suitable for latency-sensitive vehicular applications.