RSU-Aided Authentication for VANET Based on Consortium Blockchain

Vehicle Ad-hoc Network (VANET) faces a large number of potential threats due to its openness and complexity. Identity authentication is the basis for resisting various attacks. Common approaches usually employ public key infrastructure, identity-based signature and cryptography-based algorithms, which either bring high computation and storage costs, have certificate issuance, revocation, and management problems, or exist centralization problems. In this paper, we propose an identity authentication scheme for VANET based on consortium blockchain, in which vehicle or Road-Side Unit (RSU) authenticity is verified by on-chain transactions instead of certificates in other blockchain schemes. To the end, a new data structure based on unspent transaction output is introduced to initiate a set of online operations. Furthermore, we put forward an RSU-aided scheme, in which only one additional step, namely fillToken operation, is required to reduce the communication delay of authentication after a vehicle first joins an RSU group through a series of online operations. We implement the proposed scheme in the Hyperledger Fabric platform and conduct security and performance analysis, which shows the effectiveness of our scheme.