As connected and autonomous vehicles become more complex, protecting them against advanced cyber-attacks becomes more difficult. This paper proposes a hardware-based authentication mechanism to protect sensor data acquisition in vehicular networks and embedded systems. The scheme ensures that only authentic sensors and microcontrollers can communicate with the processing unit by adding trusted hardware components, such as trusted platform modules (TPM) and physical unclonable functions (PUF). The system uses lightweight embedded platforms, such as ESP32 and Raspberry Pi with ROS 2, which allow scalable and tamper-proof real-time communication. An exhaustive study of cryptography and hardware-based authentication systems is presented, from elliptic curve cryptography to chaotic map functions, to put the proposed solution in a proper perspective. The system is modularly extensible and adaptable to new technologies, such as blockchains and new encryption protocols, and provides a robust and future-proof solution for securing vehicles and sensor-based IoT sets.