A Location-Aware and Healing Attestation Scheme for Air-Supported Internet of Vehicles

With the rapid technological advancement in the Internet of Things (IoT) and Internet of Vehicles (IoV), we witness exponential growth of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). However, these integrations of IoV with other technologies make the IoV network and its interaction between different network components highly complex. Therefore, ensuring the correct functioning of the firmware and software running on these next-generation vehicles becomes an essential requirement. A feasible method to address the aforementioned security issues is Remote Attestation (RA). However, the advancement in the attackers' approaches and the increased complexity, large network size, and vehicle mobility allow the attacks to bypass these security solutions, making RA less effective. In this paper, we propose LHASIoV, an attestation and healing protocol for IoV. LHASIoV has many features such as competent-wise (treats different entities of the system differently), geographical location-aware (traces forensics of security breaches and eases healing compromised vehicles), gradual healing (via slicing the healing software) of compromised vehicles, and resistance to single-point-of-failure. We provide proof-of-concept implementation and formal operational and security analysis for LHASIoV. To show its practical feasibility and effectiveness, we provide performance analysis by implementing it on the Omnetpp simulator. The simulation results show that for an IoV system that has 100 vehicles moving with a speed range of 15-25 mph, LHASIoV needed only 5.27 seconds to complete the vehicle's attestation. For this number of vehicles and compared to the existing protocols, LHASIoV reduced the communication and storage costs on average by 54.46% and 43.92%, respectively.