BCAV: Blockchain-based certificateless authentication system for vehicular network

With the emergence of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), the communication between vehicles has become a major factor in achieving driver safety and improved driving experience. Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is considered as the most promising technology to obtain vehicular communications. However, due to openness, it faces many security and privacy issues. Therefore, different cryptographic techniques have been employed by researchers to provide efficient authentication in VANET. The existing authentication schemes in the literature have to deal with many problems such as CRL management, key distribution, key escrow, and high computation cost. Thus, this paper introduces a blockchain-based certificateless authentication scheme; unlike existing schemes that rely on a single trusted authority, the proposed scheme utilizes multiple semi-trusted authorities and blockchain to create a distributed environment. In addition, the proposed scheme makes use of a certificateless signature with a key distribution method to achieve secure authentication with low computational and storage costs. Moreover, the thorough security analysis proves the proposed scheme's resistance against various security attacks and attackers. Finally, the extensive performance analysis using cryptographic libraries and hyperledger fabric platform demonstrates that the proposed scheme is efficient in computational cost compared to existing schemes.