IOV-SMAP: Secure and efficient message authentication protocol for IoV in smart city environment

With the emergence of the concept of smart city and the increasing demands for a range of vehicles, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has achieved a lot of attention by providing multiple benefits, including vehicle emergence, accidents, levels of pollution, and traffic congestion. Moreover, IoV provides various services by combining vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) with the Internet of Things (IoT) in smart cities. However, the communication among vehicles is susceptible to various security threats because the sensitive message is transmitted via a insecure channel in the IoV-based smart city environment. Thus, a secure message authentication protocol is indispensable to ensure various services for IoV in a smart city environment. In 2020, a secure message authentication protocol for IoV communication in smart cities has been proposed. However, we discover that the analyzed scheme suffers from various potential attacks such as impersonation, secret key disclosure, and off-line guessing attacks, and also does not ensure authentication. To solve the security threats of the analyzed scheme, we design a secure and efficient message authentication protocol for IoV in a smart city environment, called IoV-SMAP. The proposed IoV-SMAP can resist security drawbacks and provide user anonymity, and mutual authentication. We demonstrate the security of IoV-SMAP by performing informal and formal analyses such as the Real-or-Random (ROR) model, and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Application (AVISPA) simulations. In addition, we compare the performance of IoV-SMAP with related existing competing authentication schemes. We demonstrate that IoV-SMAP provides better security along with efficiency than related competing schemes and is suitable for the IoV-based smart city environment.