Efficient Authentication for Vehicular Digital Twin Communications

Autonomous vehicles(AVs) have developed rapidly in recent years and derived many AV-related services. However, the stringent requirement of real-time sensing, computing, and communication may severely overload the AV, resulting in a poor passenger experience. In this work, we leverage the digital twin(DT) concept to help the information fusion and computing for AV, propose a vehicular digital twin(VDT) framework. Specifically, DT is maintained in the cloud and synchronized with its corresponding AV in real-time. AV uploads necessary information to the DT, and DT makes feedback through processing and analysis. The DT can also communicate with other DTs to obtain information. Due to the real-time information synchronization of AV and DT in an open communication environment, ensuring communication security and protect privacy is needed. To tackle those issues, we give a concrete authentication protocol for secure communication between AV and DT. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that our proposed protocol not only has less computation cost but also can satisfy the necessary security requirements.