A blockchain based certificate revocation scheme for vehicular communication systems

Both the academy and industry believe that Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) would be achievable in one decade since modern vehicle and communication technologies advanced apace. Vehicular Communication System (VCS) introduces information technology to the ITS and aims to improve road safety and traffic efficiency. In recent year, security and privacy schemes in VCS are becoming important. However, recovery mechanisms to eliminate the negative effect of security and privacy attacks are still an important topic for research. Therefore, the certificate revocation scheme is considered as a feasible technique to prevent the system from potential attacks. The major challenge of the certificate revocation scheme is to achieve low-cost operation since the communication resources must be capable of carrying various applications apart from the security and privacy purposes. In this paper, we propose an efficient certificate revocation scheme in VCS. The Blockchain concept is introduced to simplify the network structure and distributed maintenance of the Certificate Revocation List (CRL). The proposed scheme embeds part of the certificate revocation functions within the security and privacy applications, aiming to reduce the communication overhead and shorten the processing time cost. Extensive simulations and analysis show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme, in which the Blockchain structure costs fewer network resources and gives a more economic solution to against further cybercrime attacks. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.