Physical Unclonable Function Based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Autonomous Vehicles Using Hardware Acceleration

TL;DR

This paper introduces a secure authentication method for autonomous vehicles using hardware-based random keys to protect privacy and prevent cyber threats.

Contribution

A novel dual-layer authentication scheme using PUFs and FPGA acceleration for secure and efficient AV authentication in IoVs.

Findings

The PUF design achieves over 98.5% reliability and strong randomness across multiple challenges.

The authentication framework uses less than 80% of FPGA resources, showing low hardware overhead.

The system effectively prevents identity fraud and unauthorized access in IoV environments.

Abstract

With the rise of smart cities, technology has enabled more efficient urban management. A key part of this is the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs), which connects vehicles to smart city systems to improve transportation safety and efficiency. This integrated system enables wireless connection between vehicles, allowing for the sharing of essential traffic information. However, with all this connectivity, there are growing concerns about IoV security and privacy. This paper presents a new privacy-preserving authentication scheme for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) in the IoV field using physical unclonable functions (PUFs). This scheme employs a bilinear pairing-based encryption technique that supports search over encrypted data. The primary aim of this scheme is to authenticate AVs inside the IoV architecture. A novel PUF design generates random keys for our authentication technique, hence boosting security. This dual-layer security strategy safeguards against a range of cyber threats, including identity fraud, man-in-the-middle attacks, and unauthorized access to personal user data. The PUF design will guarantee the true randomness of the AVs’ users’ secret keys. To handle the large amount of data involved, we use hardware acceleration with different Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Our examination of privacy and security demonstrates the achievement of the defined design goals. The proposed authentication framework was fully implemented and validated on FPGA platforms to demonstrate its hardware feasibility and efficiency. The integrated heterogeneous PUF achieves an average reliability exceeding 98.5% across a wide temperature range, while maintaining near-ideal randomness with an average Hamming weight of 49.7% over multiple challenge sets. Furthermore, the uniqueness metric approaches 49.9%, confirming strong inter-device distinguishability among different PUF instances. The complete authentication architecture was synthesized on Nexys-100T, Zynq-104, and Kintex-116 devices, where the design utilizes less than 80% of slice Look-Up Tables (LUTs), under 27% of on-chip memory resources, and below 16% of DSP blocks, demonstrating low hardware overhead.

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