HALE-V2V: A Hybrid Adaptive Lightweight Authentication Engine for Secure Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Abstract

Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is a cornerstone of modern intelligent transportation systems, enabling real-time exchange of Basic Safety Messages (BSMs) to prevent collisions and improve traffic efficiency. However, securing these messages demands authentication that is simultaneously fast, compact, energy-efficient, and cryptographically robust, requirements that no existing standardised scheme fully satisfies. This paper presents HALE-V2V, a Hybrid Adaptive Lightweight Authentication Engine for secure V2V communication. HALE-V2V separates authentication into two temporally distinct phases: an infrequent session-bootstrap phase using Elliptic Curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange, and a high-frequency per-message authentication phase using SPECK-64/128 encryption and HMAC-BLAKE3 tag generation. This stratified design achieves 128-bit security at 0.38 ms per message, 28 bytes of overhead, 72 µJ energy consumption, and 2631 messages/second throughput, outperforming ECDSA-P256 by 5.5×, 4.6×, 6.4×, and 5.5× respectively. Formal security proofs in the eCK model demonstrate resistance to replay, Sybil, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Scalability analysis confirms sub-5 ms authentication latency with up to 300 simultaneous vehicles, while hardware synthesis requires only 1650 gate equivalents and 320 bytes of RAM. A post-quantum migration pathway via CRYSTALS-Kyber key encapsulation is also discussed, requiring no modification to the per-message authentication phase.