Secure Identity Management Framework for Vehicular Ad-hoc Network using Blockchain

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a mobile network formed by vehicles, roadside units, and other infrastructures that enable communication between the nodes to improve road safety and traffic control. While this technology promises great benefits to drivers, it has many security concerns that are critical to road safety. It is essential to ensure that only authenticated vehicles transmit data and revoked vehicles do not interfere in this communication. Many current VANET technologies also depend on a central trusted authority that can cost computation and communication overhead and be a single point of failure for the network. By using blockchain technology in VANET, we can take advantage of the decentralized and distributed framework and thereby avoid a single point of trust. Moreover, blockchain technology ensures the immutability of the data strengthening the integrity of the system. In the proposed framework, Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain technology, is used for identity management in VANET. All the vehicles with their pseudo IDs are registered, validated, and revoked using the blockchain technology. The vehicles in the network check the validity of the safety messages received from the neighboring nodes, using the services provided by the road side units that have access to the blockchain. This framework works on looking-up the pseudo IDs and public keys on the blockchain for their validity, thus promising a light-weight authentication and reduced computation and communication overhead for vehicles to access the safety messages in the network