Blockchain-Assisted Revocable Cross-Domain Authentication for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

With the rapid development of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) and the increasing diversification of user demands, interactions between different management domains have become more frequent. Identity authentication is an effective way to establish cross-domain trust and secure communication. However, the existing cross-domain authentication schemes of VANETs are limited to the same management or authentication technology for each domain and rely on centralized cross-domain identity management. Even distributed management solutions encounter latency sensitivity, security and privacy challenges. To address these challenges, we propose a blockchain-assisted revocable cross-domain authentication scheme for VANETs. The proposed scheme can establish trust between domain entities by deploying different authentication methods and using distributed management to avoid single-point failures. In addition, the scheme can revoke the identity of malicious vehicles by updating the group public key, thereby ensuring the security and privacy of cross-domain Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication. This design avoids the additional impacts of blockchain technology constraints on the high mobility and real-time requirements of VANETs. Security analysis and performance evaluation show that our scheme can resist more attacks and has better security than other related schemes while also achieving a better balance between communication and computational cost.