Pairing-Free Blockchain-Assisted Certificateless Aggregation Signcryption Scheme for VANETs

Smart vehicle applications play a crucial role in intelligent transportation systems, enabling sensor-equipped vehicles to establish dynamic networks for efficient collection, sharing, and aggregation. This significantly enhances road security and efficiency by transmitting crucial information to traffic authorities. However, partial research on certificateless aggregation signcryption (CLAS) scheme reveals an intriguing phenomenon where each proposed scheme consistently exhibits numerous security vulnerabilities, particularly susceptible to public key replacement attacks. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a blockchain-assisted certificateless aggregation sign-cryption scheme (BACLAS), leveraging blockchain technology to securely store users’ public key on a distributed ledger and prevent public key replacement attacks effectively. Furthermore, it is a provably secure communication scheme for real-world Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication while addressing practical security concerns. The BACLAS scheme ensures security in terms of existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attacks (EUF-CMA) and indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA2) based on the hardness assumption of the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem and computational Diffie-Hellman problem in the random oracle model. The proposed scheme effectively reduces computational costs and time consumption, resulting in a significant reduction of the computation burden ranging from 50.02% to 88.28% compared to other competitive schemes. Moreover, it successfully addresses the key-escrow problem, thereby achieving enhanced security properties.