Efficient Distributed Authentication for Intelligent Transportation Systems Using Mobile Devices

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) opt to improve safety and efficiency by internetworking vehicles, road infrastructure, pedestrians, etc. Given the ad-hoc connectivity and dynamic topology of such a network, robust authentication of member nodes is essential. The authentication process should also suit the resource constrained ITS nodes. This paper proposes an efficient approach for Distributed Authentication for ITS (DAITS). DAITS employs drivers’ mobile devices to act as verifiers, and hence message authentication is provided in an as-a-service basis for the ITS nodes. Moreover, DAITS is a certificateless system, which deploys private smart contracts in a permissioned blockchain, for certifying nodes. Furthermore, the smart contracts store authentication tokens for the ITS nodes which ensure authentication between the ITS nodes and road infrastructure. DAITS relies on lightweight security primitives such as hash function, bitwise XOR, and Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC). Extensive security analysis shows that DAITS can resist various security attacks. The simulation results demonstrate that DAITS is both resource-efficient and scalable, and outperforms competing schemes in terms of computation and communication overhead, and verification delay.