Blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks

Security and privacy are two challenging issues in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), which have attracted widespread concern from industry and academia. However, the existing security schemes for VANETs environment have various problems, such as the unlinkability and the cross region communication,etc. To overcome these weaknesses, this paper designs a blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme (BCPAS) for VANETs. The proposed scheme has the following two advantages: (1) Pseudonym ID is employed in authentication phase to ensure the real identity of vehicle is unlinkable. (2) Blockchain technology is adopted to make cross-region authentication more efficient. Compared with the most recent scheme, the computational efficiency of our scheme has improved 50% with 3 service management nodes, and 87% with 15 service management nodes in the Authentication and Member Secrets Generate Phase. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.