A Blockchain-Based Multidomain Authentication Scheme for Conditional Privacy Preserving in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network

Vehicular ad-hoc network enhances driving safety and enables various intelligent transportation applications by adopting the revolutionary vehicular wireless communication technology. This has attracted a lot of attentions from both academia and industry in recent years. Given the sophistication of vehicular manufacturing and the heterogeneity of intelligent transport terminals, performing vehicular authentication is of great importance. The existing schemes have largely considered vehicle security and authentication within a single administrative domain, which lacks supervision of the authority and entity in the intelligent transportation system. In this article, we propose a multidomain vehicular authentication architecture by introducing blockchain technique to build distributed trust and share cross-domain information among multiple administrative domains. To guarantee the anonymity and traceability, a pseudonym-based privacy-preserving authentication method is proposed. Specifically, considering the supervision of authority and the resilience to key escrow, we design a two-phase pseudonym distribution mechanism with the assistance of a roadside unit (RSU) proxy. We conduct in-depth security analysis by comparing with existing works and deploy experiments to show the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed scheme in the multidomain scenario.