Trustful Blockchain-Enabled Identity Management for VANET with Short-Latency Authentication

Blockchain technology has emerged as a popular research topic, particularly in the area of identity management, which provides with a decentralized ID system due to its inherent distributed architecture. This paper focuses on the security issues for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), where there exists significant obstacles to deploy blockchain-based identity manage-ment system. The idea of lightweight node seems to address such issues, as it provides a local transaction query method. However, it cannot directly suit the complex identity management scenario, as malicious revoked users can successfully exploit spoofing attacks to mislead the lightweight nodes. This paper therefore proposes a new blockchain-enabled identity management scheme for VANET system, which realizes extremely short-latency identity verification with the idea lightweight node. Especially, to achieve trustful revocation for lightweight node, we leverage the mechanism of redactable blockchain with chameleon hash, as well our tailored security protocols. The proposed scheme offers a highly secure, distributed and low-cost identity management system. The experimental result shows our advantage in terms of functionality and efficiency.