A lightweight anonymous authentication scheme with dual blockchain and self-sovereign identity for VANETs

Abstract With the rapid development of intelligent transportation systems, message interactions among various entities within the system have become increasingly frequent. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) provide vehicles with comprehensive identity authentication and message verification services through wire/wireless communication. However, traditional VANET solutions mostly rely on centralized architectures, which are prone to single points of failure, low authentication efficiency and significant communication cost. In addition, privacy protection issues such as personal information leakage of vehicle users and security authentication of messages cannot be ignored. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure and efficient dual blockchain based anonymous authentication scheme for VANETs. Minimizing reliance on centralized third parties with decentralized identifiers. Utilizing hash functions and elliptic curve cryptography to achieve vehicle registration and message authentication. Based on the random oracle model, a detailed analysis of the semantic security of the session keys is conducted. Performance comparative evaluations and security analysis demonstrate that the proposed scheme can resist most network security attacks. Compared with related schemes, it reduces the average computational cost and communication cost by 31.31% and 36.51% respectively, confirming its practical feasibility.