A Blockchain-Based Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Internet of Vehicles

Anonymous authentication is an important mechanism for providing security and privacy for vehicles in the increasing development of Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Most of the existing authentication mechanisms depend on a central trusted third party to manage large numbers of certificates or pseudonyms, to conduct the time-consuming database query operations in order to achieve both security and privacy protection for IoV. The huge computation, storage and network bandwidth burden on the central trusted entity affects greatly the performance of the authentication and also leaves potential perils for the whole system. In this paper, we suggest a new authentication scheme for IoV. Distributed authentication is achieved by using blockchain technique, in which large numbers of certificates, public-private key pairs or pseudonyms do not need to be stored in vehicles or central trusted entity. The test results and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can well satisfy the performance requirement of authentication for IoV while preserving privacy for vehicles.