A secure and lightweight data sharing scheme in vehicular digital twin network

The vehicular digital twin network (VDTN) comprises digital twins (DTs) that enable seamless communication and data transmission. This network effectively maps the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) into cyberspace, facilitating stable and efficient data sharing for corresponding physical vehicles (PVs). However, the open channels in cyberspace pose a vulnerability to malicious attacks on the data sharing process. Additionally, there is a possibility of legitimate but dishonest DTs transmitting unreliable data. To tackle these challenges, we propose a secure and lightweight data sharing scheme for VDTN in this paper, which can align with the characteristics of DTs serving as virtual agents for PVs. First, we design a trust-based attribute-matching mechanism to filter out unqualified DTs in advance. Furthermore, we develop a batch-supporting identity authentication and key negotiation protocol based on proxy signatures to ensure the security of shared data among DTs in VDTN. Security analysis demonstrates that proposed scheme can achieve diverse security functionalities, while performance analysis confirms its efficiency in terms of computation and communication overhead.