An Efficient Blockchain-Based Certificateless Anonymous Authentication Scheme for VANETs

Vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs) play a critical role in providing security and privacy protection for intelligent transportation systems. However, the limited network bandwidth and computing capacity within VANETs have resulted in existing authentication schemes having excessive computational overhead, which cannot meet the low-latency communication requirements of VANETs. To tackle these problems, we propose an efficient blockchain-based certificateless anonymous authentication scheme for VANETs. Firstly, we propose a novel signature scheme without bilinear pairing to reduce the computational overhead in VANETs. Secondly, we utilize blockchain to facilitate trusted information sharing. Thirdly, we provide privacy-preserving through the use of anonymous keys, and enable tracing of vehicle identities in the event of malicious behavior. Finally, security analysis and simulation experiments demonstrate that our proposed scheme has lower communication and computational overhead, while satisfying various security requirements for VANETs, such as anonymity, unlinkability, and traceability.