QBMA-BIV: Quantum-Key-Distribution (QKD)-Based Multi-Server Authentication Scheme for Blockchain-Enabled Internet of Vehicles

With the rapid development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and Intelligent Transportation, connected vehicles can access a variety of latency-sensitive cloud services to improve real-time road traffic conditions, driving safety and driving comfort. However, as the number of cloud service providers (CSPs) increases, vehicles and CSPs should efficiently complete authentication to ensure consistency and timeliness of IoV services. Moreover, many services are realized via public wireless channels, which are vulnerable to various security attacks and threats. Therefore, this paper proposes a secure and efficient authentication scheme for blockchain-enabled IoV based on quantum key distribution (QKD), called QBMA-BIV. The QBMA-BIV supports efficient authentication and re-authentication between vehicles and multiple servers through the lightweight signature algorithm and the quantum authentication keys. In QBMA-BIV, the authentication phase is achieved based on the QKD network and blockchain assistance, which is not dependent on third-party trusted centers and avoids the threat of a single point of failure. Furthermore, the security analysis demonstrates that QBMA-BIV could resist potential security attacks. Performance analysis also shows that QBMA-BIV could reduce computation and communication costs by 78.58%– 86.87% and 38.39%- 81.91% compared to related schemes. Simulation and experiments show that QBMA-BIV has outstanding feasibility.

I. Introduction

With the rapid development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the IoV has become an essential component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) [1]. Vehicles can access a wide range of delay-sensitive and location-aware services, for example, road traffic monitoring [2], emergency incident reporting [3], and cloud-assisted autonomous driving [4] to improve traffic conditions and driving safety. As reported in [5], it is possible to improve road traffic congestion by 60% and short distance transportation by 70% using IoV. The IoV enhances the user experience by providing flexibility, scalability, seamless connectivity, and less power consumption. However, in the IoV, where the system communicates over the public network, it is vulnerable to various attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks, replay attacks, and impersonation attacks [6]. Moreover, the information about identity and location is delivered along with messages, and leakage of these data can create privacy issues. Generally, anonymous authentication is considered a viable solution to protect the private data of vehicles [7]. Such as standards IEEE 1609.2 [8] in the United States and ETSI [9] in Europe indicate that the utilization of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) certificate systems to protect vehicular communications; [10], [11] proposed certificateless authentication scheme for IoV based on the assistance of trusted authority. However, the rapid development of ITS has led to an explosion in the number of vehicles and diverse demands for cloud services. It is a challenge to ensure that vehicular entities enjoy cloud services from different cloud service providers (CSPs) in a time-efficient and reliable manner [12]. The traditional anonymous authentication schemes, which have not considered entities needing to switch and connect efficiently between multiple CSPs, will no longer be applicable. Researchers have extended the study of single cloud services to multiple cloud services [13]. Meanwhile, the heterogeneity, high mobility, and low latency of IoV will pose significant challenges. Hence, the IoV in multi-server scenarios should be distributed, decentralized, scalable, and flexible to adapt to the future development of IoV and fully exploit the potential of ITS [14].