A Verified Protocol for Secure Autonomous and Cooperative Public Transportation in Smart Cities

This paper presents a new secure communication scheme for an Intelligent Public Transportation System (IPTS). The proposed scheme generates a cryptographic key and aims to share it among the ATSoI’s participant entities securely. It mitigates several cyber-threats such as; DoS attack, replay attack, Man-In-The-Middle Attack, and eavesdropping activities with more potential occurrences in such cooperative systems. Moreover, it relies on a nonce instead of a timestamp to avoid time synchronization problems. Thus, it provides mutual authentication, confidentiality, message integrity, the privacy of the entities’ IDs, and checking the entities’ availability. A formal verification tool (ProVerif) is used to validate the proposed protocol’s security robustness through two main steps. Firstly, coding of the proposed protocol using ProVerif syntax. Secondly, performing the analysis of the attack trace for the failure queries.