A PUF-Based Lightweight Authentication Scheme for UAV-Assisted Internet of Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)-assisted Internet of Vehicles (IoV) utilizes flexible mobility of UAVs to improve communication issues in traditional IoV model. In UAV-assisted IoV, UAVs expand the communication coverage of roadside units (RSUs) and support the tasks of RSUs. Therefore, UAV-assisted IoV can contribute to the development of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). However, an adversary can still attempt various attacks because UAV-assisted IoV networks perform wireless communication over open channels. In 2024, Miao et al. proposed an elliptic curve cryptography (ECC)-based authentication scheme for UAV-assisted IoV. Unfortunately, we discover that their scheme cannot prevent man-in-the-middle (MITM) and ephemeral secret leakage (ESL) attacks. Furthermore, Miao et al.’s scheme incurs high computational costs using ECC which is unfavorable for UAVs considering their computational restrictions. In this article, we propose a secure and lightweight authentication scheme for UAV-assisted IoV, considering the computational limitations of UAVs. We apply physical unclonable function (PUF) and fuzzy extractor to mutual authentication, developing the security level. Moreover, the proposed scheme uses only one-way hash functions and exclusive-or (XOR) operations which are compatible with UAVs. To prove the robustness of the proposed scheme, we perform “Burrows-Abadi-Needham (BAN) logic”, “Real-or-Random (RoR) model”, and “Automated Verification of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA)” based formal security analysis, and informal analysis. Furthermore, we estimate the performance of the proposed scheme and compare with other relevant works, including computational costs, communication costs, energy consumption, security properties, and storage costs. Consequently, we establish that the proposed scheme is appropriate and efficient for UAV-assisted IoV.