Secure RFID-Assisted Authentication Protocol for Vehicular Cloud Computing Environment

Vehicular network technology has made substantial advancements in recent years in the field of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) has emerged as a novel paradigm with a substantial increase in data exchange within Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). VCC integrates cloud computing, vehicular networking, and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies. It enables Infrastructure-to-Vehicle (I2V), Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V), and Vehicle-to-Device (V2D) communication. VCC optimizes vehicle, cloud infrastructure, and IoT resources while addressing significant communication security and vehicle-user privacy challenges. To address these issues, we developed an RFID-based authentication protocol for VCC based on a Henon map using a hash function. In addition, we also incorporated a Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) to resist physical tampering attacks. We validate the protocol’s security formally and informally. The formal security analysis is conducted through a widely used RoR model. We use the Scyther simulation tool to verify the proposed protocol’s security against various attacks. Moreover, we compare the performance of our protocol with similar existing protocols across important performance parameters such as communication and computation overheads and security attributes. The proposed protocol yields substantial improvements, demonstrating a 40.74% reduction in computation overhead and a 13.03% decrease in communication overhead as compared to related protocols, delivering both enhanced performance and resource efficiency. The analysis demonstrates its capacity to support secure communication in the VCC environment and satisfy desirable security attributes.