Blockchain-Based Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Mechanism for Vehicular Fog Networks

With the emergence of vehicular fog networks (VFC), the transportation system is increasingly improving traffic management and road safety. However, secure and reliable data transmissions have become crucial to ensure a better quality of service (QoS). In this direction, several conditional privacy-preserving authentication schemes have been proposed. In the literature, most schemes suffer from key escrow problems. Even the schemes that reside in this concern, they have the problem of storage and centralization; since the trusted authority (TA) must register for each vehicle all the pseudonyms that will be used. Likewise, the vehicle must store all the pseudonyms and the keys that will be used in its memory. To address all these problems, we propose a conditional privacy-preserving authentication mechanism for vehicular fog networks that allows the vehicle to generate its own private/public keys with its pseudonym when needed, and without being stored at the TA. The proposal uses elliptic curve cryptography for authentication and blockchain technology for storing registration and authentication results. The performance evaluation and security analysis show that our proposed mechanism provides improved security features compared to related work with reduced computational and communication overhead. Our mechanism has reduced the registration time of vehicles to only 0.024 ms.