Blockchain Empowered Cooperative Authentication with Data Traceability in Vehicular Edge Computing

The dynamic environment due to traffic mobility and wireless communication from/to vehicles make identity authentication and trust management for privacy preservation based on vehicular edge computing (VEC) an increasingly important problem in vehicular networks. However, existing authentication schemes mainly focus on communication between a single trusted edge computing node and multiple vehicles. This framework may suffer the bottleneck problem due to the single edge computing node, and the performance depends heavily on its resources. In this paper, a blockchain empowered group-authentication scheme is proposed for vehicles with decentralized identification based on secret sharing and dynamic proxy mechanism. Sub-authentication results are aggregated for trust management based blockchain to implement collaborative authentication. The edge computing node with a higher-reputation stored in the tamper-proof blockchain can upload the final aggregated authentication result to the central server to achieve the decentralized authentication. This work analyzes typical attacks for this scheme and shows that the proposed scheme achieves cooperative privacy preservation for vehicles while also reducing communication overhead and computation cost.