Blockchain-Based Privacy-Aware Pseudonym Management Framework for Vehicular Networks

Abstract

Vehicular networks rely on public key infrastructure (PKI) to generate the long-term and short-term (pseudonyms) certified pair of keys. This allows vehicles to use these keys to sign and to encrypt their exchanged messages in order to authenticate the sender and to ensure the integrity of messages. Therefore, the use of pseudonyms is fundamental to safeguard the security, to satisfy the non-repudiation and to revoke misbehaving nodes. However, the current PKI infrastructure is centralized making it vulnerable and at risk of being single point of failure. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based pseudonym management framework for vehicular networks that ensures the security and privacy while maintaining the functionality of the network. The security of the proposed solution was evaluated using attack tree method, and the results have shown an improved resiliency to attacks than the conventional vehicular PKI.