# An ECC-Based Anonymous and Fast Handover Authentication Protocol for Internet of Vehicles
## 1 Introduction  
As the concept of smart cities is accelerating, the Internet of Things (IoT) technology has evolved from a single-scenario application to a core driving force for promoting urban digital transformation. It is widely used in smart healthcare, intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) and other fields [1]. As an important component of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) leverages advanced information and communication technologies to enable efficient interconnection and collaboration between vehicles and road infrastructure, and between vehicles themselves, bringing revolutionary changes to ITSs through its rapid development [2]. Due to the openness of the IoV communication architecture, the system faces security threats such as identity impersonation attacks and privacy data leakage [3]. For example, the information interaction between entities faces multi-dimensional security threats such as eavesdropping, interception and tampering by the enemy. Therefore, the identity authentication mechanism has become the coremechanism to ensure the security of the IoV system. It verifies the legitimate identity of the vehicle/infrastructure through cryptographic technology, prevents spoofing attacks by malicious edge nodes [4], and ensures secure and reliable real-time communication between entities in the system. Figure 1 depicts the process of a vehicle communicating with infrastructure while driving in an IoV scenario. However, with the high-speed movement and frequent cross-domain behavior of vehicles, the number of authentication requests has increased dramatically. This not only places higher demands on the carrying capacity of the communication network, but also poses severe challenges to the performance and efficiency of the authentication protocol. How to achieve fast and secure cross-domain authentication in an IoV environment has become one of the key issues that need to be urgently addressed in the IoV field. In recent years, the academic community has made breakthrough progress in multiple dimensions in the field of vehicle network identity authentication protocols, but still faces many security and efficiency challenges. First, research on authentication protocols based on cryptographic technology, such as protocols based on public key infrastructure (PKI), can provide high security, but they rely on certificates to verify public keys. Errors in certificate authorities can undermine the entire PKI trust chain, which brings challenges to certificate management and increases the complexity and cost of large networks. In addition, in identity-based protocols, although some limitations of PKI-based authentication schemes that require the generation and storage of a large number of certificates have been solved, the user's private key is usually generated by a trusted third party. When the third party is attacked or abused, it will bring privacy and security risks and face the challenge of public key revocation. There are also some certifiateless protocols that use complex bilinear pairing or blockchain, which leads to communication delays, excessive resource consumption, and low system efficiency, and they are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks or user key attacks. It can be seen that designing a vehicle authentication protocol that protects vehicle privacy and security while reducing the system's computational overhead and communication overhead is still a work with extremely high research value. Figure 1: An Internet of Vehicles scenario. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a secure and efficient handover authentication protocol. The main contents are as follows:  
1. A secure and efficient handover authentication protocol for the Internet of Vehicles is proposed, which can achieve mutual authentication and key negotiation between vehicles and Roadside Units (RSUs), and provide secure and reliable real-time communication.