Beyond Trust: Leveraging Blockchain for Privacy-Centric VANET Authentication

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) hold promise for traffic management and driver safety, but security and privacy challenges persist. Existing protocols face limitations in key management and verification time costs. An efficient blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication mechanism leverages PKI and the functionality of Ethereum. The protocol optimizes certificate management, reduces storage requirements, and supports batch verification, improving traceability and verification efficiency. Evaluation of test networks and VANET simulations demonstrate the proposed algorithm’s superiority over existing algorithms. Although the existing solutions handle traceability time costs and verification costs efficiently. Further improvement in the efficiency of existing state-of-art models can be achieved by encoding all functions before hashing. This proposed approach tends to be more gas-efficient than previous work, particularly in dynamic data structure scenarios. Gas efficiency improvements are often more noticeable in VANET scenarios where terabytes of messages are communicated by vehicles daily, and this can also reduce the size of Signature of Knowledge (SoK) proof by using compression and parameter tuning techniques.