CyberChain: Cybertwin Empowered Blockchain for Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving Authentication in Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoVs) presents promising opportunities for vehicle to everything (V2X) applications, wherein authentication acts as the cornerstone to realize trustworthy vehicular context and to support advanced applications. However, existing authentication schemes mainly depend on centralized servers with both security and privacy issues. In this paper, we propose a CyberTwin (CT) empowered blockchain framework for authentication, namely CyberChain, to reduce both the communication and storage cost while maintaining vehicular privacy. By designing a blockchain system in the cyberspace, we decouple the consensus process from the physical world, so that the operation cost of blockchain can be reduced. A Privacy-Preserving Parallel Pedersen Commitment (P4C) algorithm is designed to protect the privacy of vehicles and accelerate the authentication process. To further enhance the operation efficiency of CyberChain, we propose a Diffused Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (DPBFT) mechanism to reach consensus in the cyberspace that can reduce consensus latency. The proposed cyberchain framework and the associated mechanisms are evaluated by qualitative analysis and simulations. The evaluation results demonstrated that the proposed cyberchain based framework significantly improves the authentication performance in terms of authentication latency, privacy, communication overhead and storage cost.