An Efficient and Revocable PUF-Based Authentication Scheme for Secure V2R Mutual Communication in VANETs

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) utilize open wireless channels to exchange safety-critical data, facilitating real-time decision-making for enhanced road safety and traffic management efficiency in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). However, the openness of these channels exposes them to various security threats. Malicious adversaries may impersonate RSUs to forge and distribute harmful commands, manipulating vehicular behavior, or masquerade as legitimate vehicles to bypass authentication protocols and gain unauthorized access. Such attacks jeopardize the security and functionality of the VANETs, underscoring the necessity of robust mutual authentication between vehicles and RSUs. Existing centralized trust authority (TA)-dependent schemes for vehicle-to-RSU (V2R) authentication incur high-computational overhead, introduce authentication latency, and cause a single point of failure, particularly in dense traffic scenarios. To address these challenges, we propose efficient, revocable authentication scheme with session key negotiation (ERAS2KN), an efficient and revocable authentication scheme with session key negotiation. By integrating physical unclonable functions (PUFs) with lightweight cryptography, such as one-way hash functions, bitwise xor, and symmetric encryption, ERAS2KN enables rapid mutual authentication and secure session key establishment. Comprehensive security analysis, including informal evaluation, formal security proof based on the real-or-random (RoR) model, and automated validation using AVISPA, confirms ERAS2KN’s resilience against vehicle impersonation, eavesdropping, vehicle/RSU compromise, man-in-the-middle, and other advance attacks. Performance evaluations demonstrate that ERAS2KN surpasses existing schemes by delivering enhanced security features while achieving the lowest computational overhead, communication overhead, and energy consumption cost, making it ideal for high-density VANETs environments.