Secure Authentication and Key Management With Blockchain in VANETs

Abstract

Nowadays, with rapid advancements of vehicular telematics and communication techniques, proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been witnessed, which facilitates the construction of promising intelligent transportation system (ITS). Due to inherent wireless communicating features in open environment, secure transmission among numerous VANET entities remains crucial issues. Currently, lots of research efforts have been made, while most of which tend to allocate the universal group key to the verified devices for both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-RSU (V2R) communications. However, in heterogeneous VANET environment with large numbers of devices in same vehicular group, complicated and variable topologies lead to continuous key updating in every moment, causing interference to regular V2R data exchange, which is not reliable and efficient for resource-constrained VANET environment. Moreover, group membership recording and detecting mechanisms are necessary for real time vehicle revocation and participation, which has not been further studied so far. In this paper, we address the above issues by proposing a secure authentication and key management scheme. In our design, novel VANET system model with edge computing infrastructure is adopted so as to offer adequate computing and storing capacity compared to traditional VANET structure. Note that our certificateless authentication scheme applies the independent session key for each vehicle for interference avoidance. Furthermore, consortium blockchain is employed for V2V group key construction. Real time group membership arrangement with efficient group key updating is accordingly provided. Formal security proofs are presented, demonstrating that the proposed scheme can achieve desired security properties. Performance analysis is conducted as well, proving that the proposed scheme is efficient compared with the state-of-the-arts. INDEX TERMS Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), certificateless authentication, dynamic group key management, consortium blockchain.

When Data Fly: An Open Data Trading System in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

“…Prior studies on data trading in dynamic environments, such as road traffic, highlighted the importance of trust of X-Node controllers in data trading and investigated the feasibility of implementing payments for data trading (e.g., [5,9]). To increase trust in data trading, existing research presents different authentication systems (e.g., [74]) and reputation management systems (e.g., [75]).…”

“…Existing research (e.g., [74,[76][77][78]) on decentralized identity management investigated the use of DLT for the mutual authentication of X-Nodes and controlling their identifying information. Previous work (e.g., [74,76]) on the authentication of X-Nodes used permissioned distributed ledgers and smart contracts (i.e., agreements that are formalized in program code and deployed to the distributed ledger). Other studies (e.g., [77,78]) present concepts related to self-sovereign identities, where users can manage data related to their identities on a distributed ledger.…”

Blockchain for Vehicular Internet of Things: Recent Advances and Open Issues

“…In [ 103 ], Tan and Chung used a consortium blockchain to manage the authentication and group key distribution in VANETs. The group membership records are maintained in the blockchain, which improves the group management process.…”

“…The system model uses a hierarchical architecture that includes the cloud layer, edge layer, and user layer. The maintenance of the blockchain is not clearly discussed in [ 103 ].…”

Blockchain and Trust for Secure, End-User-Based and Decentralized IoT Service Provision

“…Blockchain is also introduced to support processes in Artificial Intelligence (AI) [37] or P2P applications [38]. Different blockchain-based approaches aiming to benefit from its tamper-proof and decentralization feature are also present in the field of VANETs [39,40]. Some other authors dealt with scalability issues and resource constraints when implementing blockchain in IoT devices by proposing an optimized blockchain framework with a light-weight consensus method [49,50].…”