Abstract
Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) has become a key enabler for data-intensive vehicular services, yet its open wireless medium and dynamic mobility patterns introduce significant security and privacy challenges. Existing authentication mechanisms for VCC often rely on computation-heavy cryptographic primitives, rendering them unsuitable for resource-constrained radio frequency identification (RFID)-based vehicular devices. This study proposes a lightweight RFID authentication protocol that leverages xor operations, hash functions, and a physical unclonable function (PUF) to provide secure mutual authentication, resistance to physical tampering, and robustness against desynchronization attacks. The security of the proposed scheme is rigorously validated through informal analysis and formal verification using the ProVerif and the Scyther tools. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed protocol reduces computation overhead by an average of 66.8% compared with existing schemes. Although the communication overhead increases by an average of 436.01% due to the inclusion of essential security parameters, this impact is marginal in practical VCC environments where high-bandwidth vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) links dominate overall latency. Thus, the proposed protocol delivers strong security guarantees while maintaining lightweight performance suitable for real-time VCC applications.