Blockchain-Based Lightweight Certificateless Authenticated Key Agreement Protocol for V2V Communications in IoV

With the emergence of the Internet of Things, traditional vehicular ad hoc networks have evolved into the more sophisticated Internet of Vehicles (IoV). IoV is expected to play a key role in the development of future smart cities and intelligent transportation systems. However, like most information technology systems, IoV is vulnerable to the cyberattack. A hacker may gain control over a vehicle, thereby posing serious danger to the vehicle occupants, surrounding vehicles and pedestrians. Consequently, improving the security of IoV is essential in ensuring its future success. Among the various security concerns surrounding IoV, secure communications and authentication are two of the most critical. Currently, most proposed works suffers the single-point-of-failure (SPOF) problem and the trusted third party (TTP) compromise issue. To address these issues, the present study proposes a secure key generation mechanism which leverages the advantages of blockchain technology and certificateless public-key cryptography. In the proposed method, the distributed architecture of blockchain is exploited to realize a decentralized TTP service to prevent the SPOF problem and the TTP compromise issue. In addition, an authenticated key agreement (AKA) protocol based on the legal key pairs is proposed to facilitate efficient mutual authentication and session key agreement between the vehicles. The security analysis results show that the proposed schemes have excellent resistance to the typical TTP issues. Moreover, the feasibility of the proposed AKA protocol is demonstrated through the extended Canetti-Krawczyk model. Finally, the performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme yields a significant reduction in the computational cost compared to the existing AKA protocols.