Lightweight identity authentication and key agreement scheme for VANETs based on SSL-PUF.

With the rapid development of smart cities and intelligent vehicles, the communication scale in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) is expanding significantly. Simultaneously, due to the low latency, and security requirements of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), there is an increased demand for the performance of vehicle access authentication and key agreement protocols. Traditional identity authentication and key agreement protocols less frequently consider the impact of efficiency, and they use complex computations, which result in increased communication costs and reduced efficiency. As a result, these protocols are no longer suitable for resource-constrained VANETs applications. The Semiconductor Superlattice Physically Unclonable Function (SSL-PUF) which belongs to strong PUF has attracted significant attention from scholars worldwide and prompting extensive research into the applications of cryptography. This paper proposes a lightweight identity authentication and a group key agreement scheme based on SSL-PUF for vehicle-road coordination, providing information-theoretical security proofs. Finally, performance comparisons, considering communication load and computational costs, demonstrate that the proposed scheme offers significant advantages in both security and lightweight characteristics, and holds considerable significance for the security requirements in vehicle-road coordination scenarios.