Mutual Authentication Protocol for Secure Vehicular Platoon Admission

Vehicular platooning offers several advantages and plays an important role in the future of mobility. However, this technology is vulnerable to several attacks. Since vehicles can freely join and leave a platoon, it is important to ensure that only legitimate vehicles are admitted into a platoon. In this paper, we propose a mutual authentication protocol to securely admit vehicles into a platoon. The proposed protocol is built on the concepts of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs). Each vehicle creates its DID which helps to achieve vehicle identity privacy. The vehicles must register with a Trusted Authority (TA) to join platoons. The TA issues a VC to the registered vehicle. The platoon leader and the vehicle joining the platoon verify each other’s VC before the vehicle joins the platoon. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol ensures secure platoon admission and preserves the privacy of vehicles. We also provide a proof of concept implementation of the blockchain network for the proposed scheme using Ethereum. We use the online Integrated Development Environment (IDE) Remix to compile and run the smart contract written in Solidity code for the proof of concept implementation. A performance analysis of the proposed protocol shows that its computation cost is less than that of other existing schemes for platoon admission.