Blockchain-based fast handover authentication protocol for Internet of Vehicles in small industrial parks

Autonomous vehicles safeguard the security and efficiency of Internet of Vehicles systems in small industrial parks by authenticating and exchanging real-time information with transportation infrastructure. Deploying a multi-server framework reduces the risk of message blocking and privacy information leakage from centralized services. However, in traditional handover authentication protocols, there are still potential security risks such as high-overhead performance issues and single point of failure attacks. Therefore, it is considered challenging to realize efficient authentication while protecting the privacy of vehicles. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient handover authentication protocol for autonomous vehicles in a small industrial park to address the challenges. The protocol is based on blockchain and Pedersen verifiable secret sharing scheme, which not only ensures lightweight real-time interactions between autonomous vehicles and edge servers in multi-server environments, but also strictly protects the security and privacy of both vehicles and edge servers. We prove the semantic security of the protocol under the Real-Or-Random model and perform a informal analysis of its security attributes to show that it can withstand a wide range of malicious attacks. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol satisfies more security requirements and has better computational efficiency and communication cost than other related protocols.