Blockchain-based Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol with Implicit Certificates for Vehicular Edge Computing

Abstract

With the gradual commercialization of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), conventional cloud-based vehicular networks often fall short of keeping pace with real-world demands for low latency and high mobility. To fully exploit the growth potential of the IoV and overcome the challenges of effective communication, the concept of mobile edge computing has been applied to the IoV field, namely, vehicular edge computing (VEC). Nonetheless, a series of security issues have appeared due to the explosive growth of various vehicular service data in the VEC. As a result, the security and conditional privacy of the VEC have become an urgent research hotspot. While several authentication schemes have been proposed to address secure communication in the VEC, most of them typically suffer from key escrow issues and lack conditional traceability and a decentralized datacenter. Thus, a blockchain-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication protocol with implicit certificates for vehicular edge computing is proposed in this paper. Furthermore, we provided formal security analysis using the formal security verification tool and informal security analysis to demonstrate that our designed protocol is secure and resilient against several security attacks. The performance evaluation results show that our protocol can meet security requirements while reducing computing and communication overheads compared with the existing protocols.