A Decentralized Authenticated Key Agreement Scheme Based on Smart Contract for Securing Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Since the communication channels in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are wireless and open, malicious adversaries can monitor or fabricate messages transmitted across them. To secure vehicular communications, an authenticated key agreement (AKA) scheme needs to be designed for VNAETs. Traditional VANETs AKA schemes require the trusted authority (TA) to authenticate the legality of message and corresponding sender. However, the TA in these schemes is vulnerable to suffer from single-point-of-failure issues. Some blockchain-based VANETs AKA schemes have been proposed recently to address the deficiency. However, these schemes rely on the consortium or private blockchain in which TAs are still required for key generation, resulting that the practicality is limited. To solve the issue, we design a smart contract-based VANETs AKA scheme, where the AKA algorithm of our proposed scheme is implemented on smart contract deployed on a public blockchain system and the TA that is responsible for key generation will not be required. The security proof and analysis show that our proposed scheme satisfies the session-key semantic security and essential security and privacy requirements, respectively. The performance analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme outperforms existing blockchain-based VANETs AKA schemes.

I. Introduction

With the substantial advancement of the wireless communication technology and rapid growth of the number of vehicles, the development of all kinds of intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications have attracted a lot of attention in both academic and industrial fields. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), as the most valuable technology that integrates transportation with the automobile, are the basement of ITS applications. In VANETs, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), vehicle-to-network (V2N), and vehicle-to-pedestrian (V2P), vehicle-to-grid (V2G) are the main communication types, which can be implemented by IEEE 802.11p or cellular communication network (e.g., 4 G, 5 G). In general, ITS applications can be divided into two types, i.e., traffic-related applications and entertainment-related applications. In traffic-related applications, vehicles broadcast Basic Safety Message (BSM), which includes velocity, GPS location, heading, and other information relating to the state or predicted path of the vehicle. In entertainment-related applications, drivers and passengers can receive information for Internet access, distributed games, file sharing, and so on [1], [2], [3].