Blockchain-Based Efficient Access Control With Handover Policy in IoV-Enabled Intelligent Transportation System

Recent advances in Internet technology and IoT devices have facilitated researchers to foster a wide range of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that improve the quality of automated transportation by addressing real-time safety and traffic management issues. The participating ITS agents, such as smart cars and roadside equipment, are required to communicate urgently through an open (unsecured) wireless channel in an unattended setting. To address the security issues, several vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) authentication and access control protocols have been proposed in recent times. However, fast-moving vehicles need to set up frequent authentication with different roadside units, which induces high computation and communication overheads. Consequently, it becomes a bottleneck for the resource-limited vehicle onboard unit devices. As the blockchain supports decentralized storage with data integrity and transparency, in this article, we design a secure and lightweight Internet of Vehicles (IoV)-enabled blockchain-based access control protocol with a handover authentication facility (we call it BACHP-IoV, in short). The handover authentication mechanism exploits no computation-costly cryptographic primitives. Once the transactions or messages have been securely gathered by a roadside unit (RSU), $RSU_{j}$, residing in a group of vehicles $Vh_{i}$, will form a partial block, which is later forwarded to a cloud server node in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cloud servers blockchain network for converting it into a full block. Next, the full blocks are mined using a voting-based consensus algorithm. In addition, the in-charge trusted authority $\mathcal {TA}$ uploads information about the registered vehicles, such as randomized masked passwords and random secrets, to the blockchain. Thus, an $RSU_{j}$ can check the authenticity of a particular vehicle as well. We prove the security strength of the proposed BACHP-IoV by using the well-known Real-or-Random (ROR)-based random oracle model, the ProVerif 2.03 simulation tool, and informal security analysis. We have implemented the proposed BACHP-IoV through network simulator 3 (NS-3) and blockchain, and the simulation results demonstrate that BACHP-IoV is practical in a real-life scenario. A detailed comparative analysis also shows that BACHP-IoV provides significantly better security and efficiency than the existing competing schemes.