Open Access

ARTICLE

Unleashing the Potential of Metaverse in Social IoV: An Authentication Protocol Based on Blockchain

Tsu-Yang Wu^1,2,3, Haozhi Wu³, Maoxin Tang^1,2, Saru Kumari⁴, Chien-Ming Chen^1,2,*

1 School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University of Information Science & Technology, Nanjing, 210044, China
2 Jiangsu Provincial Key Laboratory of Culture and Tourism for Research on the Application Technology of Metaverse Cultural Tourism Scenarios (Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology), Nanjing, 210044, China
3 College of Computer Science and Engineering, Shandong University of Science and Technology, Qingdao, 266590, China
4 Department of Mathematics, Chaudhary Charan Singh University, Meerut, 250004, India

* Corresponding Author: Chien-Ming Chen. Email:

Computers, Materials & Continua 2025, 84(2), 3175-3192. https://doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2025.065717

Received 20 March 2025; Accepted 09 May 2025; Issue published 03 July 2025

Abstract

As a model for the next generation of the Internet, the metaverse—a fully immersive, hyper-temporal virtual shared space—is transitioning from imagination to reality. At present, the metaverse has been widely applied in a variety of fields, including education, social entertainment, Internet of vehicles (IoV), healthcare, and virtual tours. In IoVs, researchers primarily focus on using the metaverse to improve the traffic safety of vehicles, while paying limited attention to passengers’ social needs. At the same time, Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) introduces the concept of social networks in IoV to provide better resources and services for users. However, the problem of single interaction between SIoV and users has become increasingly prominent. In this paper, we first introduce a SIoV environment combined with the metaverse. In this environment, we adopt blockchain as the platform of the metaverse to provide a decentralized environment. Concerning passengers’ social data may contain sensitive/private information, we then design an authentication and key agreement protocol called MSIoV-AKA to protect the communications. Through formal security verifications in the real-or-random (ROR) model and using the AVISPA (Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications) tool, we firmly verify the security of the protocol. Finally, detailed comparisons are made between our protocol and robust protocols/schemes in terms of computational cost and communication cost. In addition, we implement the MSIoV-AKA protocol in the Ethereum test network and Hyperledger Sawtooth to show the practicality.

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Keywords

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