Blockchain-based VANET edge computing-assisted cross-vehicle enterprise authentication scheme

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is considered one of the feasible solutions to improve the efficiency and safety of modern transportation systems, and it provides new opportunities for creating a safe and efficient traffic environment. In recent years, this technology has attracted extensive attention from the academic community. However, VANET is an open network with frequent information interaction, and users are vulnerable to security and privacy threats. The existing schemes mainly consider the identity authentication of vehicles in vehicle enterprises (VEs). Due to concerns about the leakage of core data, VEs lack the motivation to establish a cross-vehicle enterprise identity authentication framework. Based on the above analysis, we propose a cross-vehicle enterprise authentication architecture by designing a two-stage certificate generation mechanism where certificate authority (CA) and VEs cooperate to generate identity credentials for vehicles. To address the concerns of VEs, we establish distributed trust and enable information sharing across VEs by introducing a consortium blockchain composed of car companies, CA, and pseudonym certificate authority (PCA). Considering the need for vehicles to access road traffic information, we use a public blockchain to store public information, and the practical byzantine fault tolerant (PBFT) algorithm is used to reach consensus. Instead of using computationally complex bilinear pairing and mapping-to-point hashing operations, the proposed scheme uses an elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC), considering the limited hardware resources of the vehicle and RSU. In addition, our scheme integrates edge computing to solve complex computing tasks that cannot be performed locally and further reduces system latency. Security analysis and performance analysis show that our scheme has better performance than existing schemes in terms of security, computational overhead, and communication overhead.