Post-Quantum Anonymous, Traceable and Linkable Authentication Scheme Based on Blockchain for Intelligent Vehicular Transportation Systems

Abstract

As the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become the critical part of Intelligent Vehicular Transportation Systems (IVTS), massive IoV entities (e.g., RSU, OBU, pedestrians’ mobile devices, etc.) get involved into IVTS. At present, one of the biggest challenges with IoV/IVTS is how to maintain a balance between security and privacy. The receivers need to be sure that they are receiving reliable messages from the origin and could trace or link the attacker’s identity, but the tracing or linking may work against the sender’s need for identity privacy. To solve the security and privacy problem, most of current works have proposed authentication solutions to provide anonymous, traceable and unlinkable schemes, which are still vulnerable to either Sybil attacks or quantum attacks. Therefore, we propose the blockchain-based post-quantum anonymous, traceable and linkable authentication scheme by utilizing NIST winner post-quantum algorithms and related post-quantum linkable ring signature. Grounded on the authentication scheme, we also develop key exchange mechanism, which help IoV entities perform efficient message authentication encryption/decryption during P2P communication and broadcast. The security analysis shows that our proposal is resistant to Sybil attack and provides other essential security characteristics including man-in-the-middle-proof and anti-replay. Finally, we perform detailed performance evaluation including each on-chain API execution time, the off-chain communication time and the on-board/on-chain storage requirements. To further evaluate the feasibility of our scheme in the IoV/IVTS environment, we also show the effectiveness of our proposal in a blockchain-based simulation study.