Abstract—In recent times, growth in the number of vehicles equipped with smart and complex electronics has been exponential and will only further increase in the future, resulting in more and more connected vehicles on road. This has led to the rise of a concept called Internet of Vehicles (IoV) capable of providing a wide range of applications, such as driver/passenger safety, entertainment, traffic efficiency, reduced traffic, pollution control etc. Basically, IoV is a large network containing multiple entities such as vehicles, portable electronic devices carried by pedestrians, Road-Side Units (RSU), traffic lights etc. Such a large concept involves a lot of effort, research, planning, and challenges. One out of many challenges in IoV is the strong and secure authentication of the vehicles attempting to connect to the network. This project proposes a lightweight mutual authentication scheme which enables the vehicle and the server to mutually authenticate each other before establishing a connection. Since it is a crucial requirement in IoV scenario, the proposed protocol combines eXclusive OR (XOR) and hashing operations to ensure lightweightness. Furthermore, the protocol is designed to protect against common attacks that entities in IoV suffer from. The security and performance analysis of the proposed protocol conducted in this project demonstrates that the authentication scheme satisfies the performance and security requirements of IoV. Throughout the security analysis phase, the protocol was found to defend against all common attacks in IoV. During computational cost calculation, it was found that the protocol consumes 0.018ms to execute on a single desktop setup, making it suitable to be used in the IoV environment.
 
Keywords—Internet of Vehicles (IoV), mutual authentication, security, communication


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