Block-CLAP: Blockchain-Assisted Certificateless Key Agreement Protocol for Internet of Vehicles in Smart Transportation

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), numerous potential applications have come up with the use of the Internet of Things (IoT)-empowered smart devices. In IoV, vehicles, roads, street signs and traffic lights can accordingly adjust to changing conditions in order to assist drivers, and also to improve safety, ease congestion and pollution reduction. Since various entities in an IoV environment make communications over public channels, there are potential security threats. To deal with such serious threats, we design a new blockchain-assisted certificateless key agreement protocol for IoV in smart transportation context, called Block-CLAP. In Block-CLAP, through authentication key management, traffic-centric data reach to a cluster head (CH) and then to its nearby road-side unit (RSU) securely using the established secret keys. A cloud server (CS) then securely collects the information from its attached RSUs and create the transactions. Later, the transactions are formed into blocks by the CS in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cloud servers network, and the blocks are verified and added through voting-based consensus algorithm in the blockchain. The detailed security analysis through formal, informal and formal security verification, and comparative study show that Block-CLAP provides superior security and has low communication and computational overheads as compared with other existing competing authentication schemes in the IoV environment. Finally, the blockchain-based implementation of Block-CLAP has been performed to measure computational time needed for a varied number of transactions per block and also for a varied number of blocks mined in the blockchain.

Automated summary

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the blockchain-assisted certificateless key agreement protocol Block-CLAP provides superior security and lower communication and computational overheads compared to existing competing authentication schemes.