Zero Trust-based Decentralized Identity Management System for Autonomous Vehicles

The rise of autonomous vehicles (AVs) promises to significantly enhance transportation safety and efficiency by mitigating human error, which is responsible for over 90\% of road accidents. However, the increasing connectivity of AVs introduces new cybersecurity challenges, as traditional perimeter-based security models are inadequate for dynamic and untrusted environments. This paper presents a novel Zero Trust-based Decentralized Identity Management (D-IM) protocol for AVs. By integrating the core principles of Zero Trust Architecture, "never trust, always verify", with the tamper resistant and decentralized nature of a blockchain network, our framework eliminates reliance on centralized authorities and provides continuous verification for every entity. We detail the system's design, which leverages Hyperledger Iroha to enable lightweight and secure authentication without a central trusted entity. A comprehensive experimental evaluation, conducted across both urban and highway scenarios, validates the protocol's practicality. Our results demonstrate that the D-IM framework introduces minimal overhead, with less than 7.5\% reduction in Packet Reception Rate (PRR) in urban settings and an increase of under 11\% in Channel Busy Ratio (CBR) for LTE-V2X. These findings prove the protocol's efficiency and robustness, providing a resilient foundation for securing real-time V2X communication against impersonation and replay attacks.