Blockchain Based Vehicle Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a pervasive network, where vehicles communicate with nearby vehicles and infrastructure nodes, such as Road-side unit (RSU). Information sharing among vehicles is an essential component of an intelligent transportation system (ITS), but security and privacy concerns must be taken into consideration. Security of the network can be improved by granting access only to authenticated vehicles and restricting or revoking access for vehicles involved in misbehavior. In this paper, we present a novel blockchain based approach to authenticate vehicles and notify other vehicles about any unauthorized messages in real time. This helps protect other vehicles in the network from making critical decisions based on false or inaccurate information. In the proposed architecture, vehicles communicate with each other using pseudonyms or pseudo IDs and the Blockchain is used to securely maintain the real identity of all vehicles, which can be linked to the pseudo IDs if needed. The goal is to protect privacy or individual vehicles, while still ensuring accountability in case of misbehavior. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated for different vehicle and attacker densities, and results demonstrate it has lower authentication delay and communication overhead compared to existing approaches.