The Internet of vehicles technology has developed rapidly in recent years and has become increasingly important. The social Internet of vehicles provides better resources and services for the development of the Internet of vehicles and provides better experience for users. However, there are still many security problems in social vehicle networking environments. Once the vehicle is networked, the biggest problem is data security according to the three levels of data collection, intelligent analysis, and decision control of the Internet of vehicles. Recently, Wu et al. proposed a lightweight vehicle social network security authentication protocol based on fog nodes. They claimed that their security authentication protocol could resist various attacks. However, we found that their authentication protocols are vulnerable to internal attacks, smart card theft attacks, and lack perfect forward security. In this study, we propose a new protocol to overcome these limitations. Finally, security and performance analyses show that our protocol perfectly overcomes these limitations and exhibits excellent performance and efficiency.

Currently, the automotive industry has entered a period of considerable advancement, shifting towards the development of safe, comfortable, and connected autonomous vehicles. However, the need for real‐time sensing, computation, and communication may lead to information overflow in autonomous cars, resulting in data redundancy. Furthermore, anticipating traffic conditions beyond a vehicle's field of view can be quite difficult owing to the restricted range of communication systems. To solve these problems, digital twin systems have been developed for autonomous driving environments. Because autonomous vehicles are driven on open public road networks, this function may jeopardize vehicles, user‐identifying information, and sensitive data. Hence, an authentication scheme that can be deployed in digital‐twin‐enabled autonomous vehicle environments is needed. In this study, we propose a privacy‐preserving authentication mechanism. To establish the security of the proposed method, we performed a formal security analysis based on the real‐or‐random model. Furthermore, we assessed the performance of the proposed scheme, and our results demonstrate that it can reduce calculation and transmission costs.