A lightweight blockchain based secure authentication scheme for vehicular ad-hoc network

Today Vehicular ad-hoc Network (VANET) has become an integral part of intelligent transport system (ITS) and dissemination of important and urgent events are of the utmost priority in the dynamic scenario. Critical life threatening occurrence of events has to traverse unprotected and insecure public/private network. Therefore, exponentially growing VANET has been going through various security concerns. Fundamentally VANET solves security challenges in centralized approach where centrally trusted unit experiences single point failure issues. To handle the prevailing security concern, we propose a light weight blockchain-based authentication scheme (LBBAS) for secured message delivery for VANET. The proposed scheme can offer decentralization and parallel computing using suitable blockchain enabled VANET framework for communicating critical traffic events among desired users within the defined geo-spatial boundary. In LBBAS, RSU authentication is used as smart contract to restrict malicious users and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is used to minimize computation cost. We have analyzed security strength and it is found that the proposed scheme avoids all the major known attacks. The comparison shows that the proposed protocol is more efficient, competent, secured and faster than other available protocols.