An Efficient Decentralized Key Management Mechanism for VANET With Blockchain

The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has been considered as one of the most prominent technologies for improving the efficiency and safety of modern transportation systems. However, VANET will present a unique range of challenges and opportunities for security. In particular, key management, as the footstone to build a practical security framework in VANET, becomes a research hotspot. In this paper, we investigate key management based on blockchain for VANET. We first propose an efficient decentralized key management mechanism for VANET with blockchain (DB-KMM) to automatically realize the registration, update and revocation of user’s public key. At the same time, we present a lightweight mutual authentication and key agreement protocol based on the bivariate polynomial. Then, we analyze the security of DB-KMM in the universally composable framework and show that the mechanism can prevent the typical attacks including internal attacks, DoS attacks, public key tampering attacks and collusion attacks. Finally, we analyze the performance of the proposed scheme through experiments and simulation. Experiment results show that DB-KMM has better performance than the existing schemes in terms of communication, storage, computation overhead and latency.

I. Introduction

Recent advances in wireless communication technologies and automobiles have fuelled the growth of Intelligent Transport System (ITS) which addresses various vehicular traffic issues like traffic congestion, information dissemination, accident etc. Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) is an integral component of ITS in which moving vehicles are connected and communicate wirelessly. IEEE 802.11p is proposed as the first wireless access standard in vehicular environment [1], [2], which promotes the development of VANET. In addition, the maturity of 5G technology injects huge potential into the VANET. With the higher reliability and lower latency of 5G [3], the layout of the automatic driving, intelligent transportation and intelligent city is certain to come true in the near future. Although the development of VANET is motivated by the formulation of the wireless communication technology (IEEE 802.11p or 5G), some security issues of communication are still unsolved [4], and one of the most serious issues is the key management.