V2XCom: Lightweight and secure message dissemination scheme for Internet of vehicles

Abstract Smart cities provide a sustainable transport ecosystem to connect smart vehicles through sensors and networking units. Internet‐of‐vehicles (IoV) is vital in disseminating various messages, including road safety, exact location sharing, road accidents and blocks, collision warning, driver assistance, network congestion, or toll payment among vehicle‐to‐anything (V2X) units. Due to the mission‐critical nature of the IoV ecosystem, it requires reliable, lightweight, and real‐time communication for vehicle‐to‐vehicle (V2V) and V2X units. However, due to the availability of insecure wireless channels, an adversary can perform several security attacks such as replay, password guessing, masquerade, trace, message tampering, Man‐in‐the‐middle attack (MIMA), and plain‐text attacks in an IoV environment which may lead to potential disruptions. Motivated by the aforementioned facts, we propose a V2XCom , a lightweight and secure message dissemination scheme for the IoV network using low‐cost cryptographic SHA‐256, XoR operation, and concatenation. We performed security verification of V2XCom using the Scyther and AVISPA tools. Moreover, security proofs are provided for an informal security analysis of the proposed scheme. We have done a comparative analysis of a V2XCom with recent dissemination schemes in the IoV ecosystem concerning security features, communication latency, computational cost, and energy usage.