Highly secure authentication and key agreement protocol for the internet of vehicles

In the contemporary era, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) plays a pivotal role in traffic management, especially in the context of highly scalable and dynamic 5 G networks. Safeguarding these networks presents numerous challenges, particularly in controlling access for unauthenticated users and establishing secure key agreements with fine-grained access control. Balancing these security measures is vital to prevent unauthorized information flow while aligning with the promising goals of future generation technologies. Despite numerous related studies being conducted, existing schemes face risks such as privacy breaches, identity tracing, and substantial computation overheads. Consequently, there is an urgent need to introduce a more secure and efficient scheme to counter various attacks. This paper introduces an authenticated key agreement scheme, tailored for fog-based IoV. The scheme’s security is established under the Random Oracle Model and verified using the ProVerif tool. Additionally, a performance assessment is conducted, demonstrating that the proposed protocol simultaneously meets both security and efficiency requirements when compared to several related schemes.