A Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for VANETs based on Consortium Blockchain

Abstract

The authentication protocol is commonly served as the first defense line against various attacks in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Conventional schemes usually employ public key infrastructure or cryptography-based algorithms, which suffer from high computational and storage cost. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving authentication scheme for VANETs based on consortium blockchain. The authenticity of a vehicle or a road-side unit is represented by its transaction capability on blockchain instead of a certificate or a cryptographic key. In support of that, we design a novel data structure based on the unspent transaction output (UTXO) combined with a set of online operations, including issue, transfer, query and revocation. Thus, the authentication between two entities is accomplished by on-chain verification and corresponding communications. We conduct a set of security and privacy analysis as well as implementing a prototype on the Hyperledger Fabric platform, to evaluate the effectiveness and the efficiency of the proposed scheme.