Abstract
With the advent of smart city networks and increased utilization of vehicles, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has attracted more attention from researchers. But, providing security to this type of network is one of the challenging and demanding tasks in the present day. For this purpose, the conventional works developed many networking frameworks and methodologies to enhance the privacy and security of smart city systems. Still, it has the significant limitations of high complexity in algorithm design, requires more time consumption for processing, reduced maintenance, and does not require proper authentication verification. Therefore, the primary purpose of this work is to develop a new security model for smart city networks using a combination of methodologies. Here, the Collaborative Mutual Authentication (CMA) mechanism is used to validate the identity of users based on the private key, public key, session key, and generated hash function. In addition, the Meta-heuristic Genetic Algorithm - Random Forest (MGA-RF) technique is deployed to detect the attacks in the network, ensuring the security of the smart city. During an evaluation, the proposed authentication-based security mechanism's performance is validated using various parameters, and the results are compared with the recent state-of-the-art models.