An Efficient Blockchain-based Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme in VANET

With emerging technology, the blockchain-based Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANET) can alleviate traffic congestion and optimize resource management to improve the transportation system's efficiency significantly. However, since the information transmitted in VANET is distributed in an open environment, security, and privacy are now critical issues. Recently, many authentication protocols based on Tamper-Proof Devices (TPD) have been proposed to solve the above-mentioned hindrances, and most of them rely on the ideal TPD with extreme security assumptions. Moreover, when the aggregate signature verification fails, these schemes can only completely discard the aggregate signature, which is impractical for VANET. In order to solve the above problems, we propose a more realistic TPD-based identity verification scheme with a privacy protection function for the blockchain-based VANET. Specifically, it uses an offline self-update method to periodically update the data in the TPD to resist side-channel attacks. Our performance analysis shows that the proposed scheme is superior to the existing schemes regarding security and average delay, so it is more suitable for the actual blockchain-based VANET environment.