BLA: Blockchain-Assisted Lightweight Anonymous Authentication for Distributed Vehicular Fog Services

As modern vehicles and distributed fog services advance apace, vehicular fog services (VFSs) are being expected to span across multiple geo-distributed datacenters, which inevitably leads to cross-datacenter authentication. Traditional cross-datacenter authentication models are not suitable for the scenario of high-speed moving vehicles accessing VFS, because these models either ignored user privacy or ignored the delay requirement of driving vehicles. This paper proposes a blockchain-assisted lightweight anonymous authentication (BLA) mechanism for distributed VFS, which is provisioned to driving vehicles. BLA can achieve the following advantages: 1) realizing a flexible cross-datacenter authentication, in which a vehicle can decide whether to be reauthenticated or not when it enters a new vehicular fog datacenter; 2) achieving anonymity, and granting vehicle users the responsibility of preserving their privacy; 3) it is lightweight by achieving noninteractivity between vehicles and service managers (SMs), and eliminating the communication between SMs in the authentication process, which significantly reduces the communication delay; and 4) resisting the attack that the database governed by one center is tampered with. BLA achieves these advantages by effectively combining modern cryptographical technology and blockchain technology. These security features are demonstrated by carrying out security analysis. Meanwhile, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the efficiency and practicality of BLA.

I. Introduction

A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a subset of a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) which consists of mobile vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Each vehicle is equipped with an on-board unit (OBU) and a group of sensors. VANETs have been depending primarily on cloud computing services for communication, computing, and storage facilities [1]. The tremendous rise in the number of connected vehicles and their ever-increasing mobility create the demand for low latency and uninterrupted services. Meeting the quality of service of users is an important challenge to vehicular cloud computing services that integrates cloud computing with VANETs [2]. Therefore, vehicular fog computing (VFC) [3] was proposed to overcome the challenges of efficient communication and computation with the emergence of latest and advanced vehicular applications [4]. VFC is considered as one of the most potential techniques to be highly beneficial for latency-sensitive applications which is ideal for high-speed moving vehicles. Thus, there are more and more attentions to the security and performance of vehicular fog services (VFSs) during its applications and popularizations.