Abstract: With the development of automotive information technology, the internet of vehicles (IOV) between vehicles and vehicle-cloud interconnected communication has become a reality. However, while the IOV brings convenience to people, it also gives hackers the opportunity to conduct the unauthorized capture or revision of the data packets sent by using fake identity, thus posing a security threat to the user. Therefore, the identity authentication of both parties in vehicle communications plays a vital role in vehicle safety. In this paper, on the basis of comparison on commonly used public key encryption algorithms, it is proposed to use elliptic curve cryptography and other security strategies to verify the authenticity of the connected vehicle network users. The results of experiments show that the adoption of the method proposed to perform the encryption and authentication of inter-vehicle communications effectively ensure the communications security of IOV, with 83% less time consumed compared with traditional public key encryption algorithms

Key words: internet of vehicles, network safety, elliptic curve encryption algorithm, identity authentication