Blockchain based Efficient, Secure and Anonymous Conditional Privacy Preserving and Authentication Mechanism for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

The rapid advancement in the area of Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) has carried numerous comforts to individuals due to its capability to support vehicles with wireless data communication with the help of Road Side Units (RSUs) and without any preexisting infrastructure. The exchange of information among vehicle nodes is critical due to its rapid and changing topologies, high mobility of nodes, and unpredictable network conditions. Finding a single trusted entity to store and distribute messages among vehicle nodes is also a challenging task. The potential also exposes to a variety of security and privacy threats such as hijacking and unauthorized location tracking of smart vehicles. Traceability is an increasingly important aspect of vehicular communication in the last few decades to detect and penalize malicious nodes. Moreover, achieving both privacy and traceability can also be a challenging task. To deal with these challenges, this study presents Blockchain-based Efficient, Secure and Anonymous Conditional Privacy-Preserving and Authentication Mechanism for Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANET) called BESA (Blockchain-based efficient, secure and authenticated). This solution is based on blockchain to allow vehicles with mechanisms to become anonymous and take control of their data during their communication and voting process. The proposed secure mechanism provides conditional privacy to the users and the vehicles. Blockchain offers a distributed ledger that can record transactions. To ensure anonymity, traceability, unlikability of data sharing among vehicles, we utilize Hyperledger Fabric to establish blockchain. The proposed scheme fulfills the requirement of VANET to analyze different algorithms and schemes which are adopted for blockchain technology for a decentralized, secure, efficient, private, and traceable system. The proposed scheme examines and evaluates different consensus algorithms used in blockchain and anonymization techniques to preserve privacy. This study also proposes a reputation-based voting system for Hyperledger Fabric to ensure the secure and reliable leader selection process in its consensus algorithm. The proposed BESA scheme is evaluated with the existing state-of-the-art schemes and achieves better results.