Securing cross-domain authentication in vehicular ad hoc networks

With the advancement of automotive telematics and communication technologies, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have gradually come on stage, which enables the blooming of vehicular networks. The emerging fifth-generation (5G) mobile communication technology stands to deliver highly secure, low-latency wireless communication services. Furthermore, through fog computing architecture, 5G facilitates the collection of data on a global scale and controlling the entire network from a central location. However, this wireless communication model brings important difficulties for cross-domain authentication, privacy, and in turn monitoring harmful domains for the heterogeneous domains of a 5G-assisted vehicular network. To this end, this paper introduces a new cross-domain authentication solution employing blockchain and fog computing to mitigate these negative effects. The FCCA Protocol: This fog computing-enabled cross-domain authentication (FCCA) protocol establishes a secure authentication framework between vehicles and back-end fog servers, which guarantees accountability for possibly dangerous vehicles while protecting the private information of vehicle users. The FCCA protocol minimizes reliance on trusted authorities while offering a variety of important functions like cross-domain communication, single registration, authenticity of messages, privacy protection, anonymity, unlinkability, and traceability. We further proved that the FCCA protocol is resilient to hijacking, birthday collision, and man-in-the-middle attacks, which render other protocols vulnerable. Moreover, it is proven that, when including the costs of security, computation, communication, and energy, the FCCA protocol is the most cost-performance effective protocol.