Blockchain-Assisted Lightweight Authenticated Key Agreement Security Framework for Smart Vehicles-Enabled Intelligent Transportation System

Badshah, Akhtar and Abbas, Ghulam and Waqas, Muhammad and Muhammad, Fazal and Abbas, Ziaul Haq and Bilal, Muhammad and Song, Houbing (2024) Blockchain-Assisted Lightweight Authenticated Key Agreement Security Framework for Smart Vehicles-Enabled Intelligent Transportation System. IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, 21 (3). pp. 2425-2439. ISSN 1545-5955

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Abstract

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) supported by smart vehicles have revolutionized modern transportation, offering a wide range of applications and services, such as electronic toll collection, collision avoidance alarms, real-time parking management, and traffic planning. However, the open communication channels among various entities, including smart vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and fleet management systems, introduce security and privacy vulnerabilities. To address these concerns, we propose a novel security framework, named blockchain-assisted lightweight authenticated key agreement security framework for smart vehicles-enabled ITS (BASF-ITS), which ensures data protection both during transit and while stored on cloud servers. BASF-ITS employs a combination of efficient cryptographic primitives, including hash functions, XOR operator, ASCON, elliptic curve cryptography, and physical unclonable functions (PUF), to design authenticated key agreement schemes. The inclusion of PUF significantly enhances the system's resistance to physical attacks, preventing tampering attempts. To ensure data integrity when stored on the cloud, our framework incorporates blockchain technology. By leveraging the immutability and decentralization of the blockchain, BASF-ITS effectively safeguards data at rest, providing an additional layer of security. We rigorously analyze the security of BASF-ITS and demonstrate its strong resistance against potential security ass aults, making it a robust and reliable solution for smart vehicle-enabled ITS. In a comparative analysis with contemporary competing schemes, BASF-ITS emerges as a promising approach, offering superior functionality traits, enhanced security features, and reduced computation, communication, and storage costs. Furthermore, we present a practical implementation of BASF-ITS using blockchain technology, showcasing the computational time versus the "transactions per block"and the "number of mined blocks", confirming its efficiency and viability in real-world scenarios. Note to Practitioners-This article is motivated by designing an efficient, lightweight, and anonymous blockchain-enabled authenticated security framework that can fix the security and privacy concerns in insecure environments for ITS applications, such as automated road speed enforcement, collision avoidance alarm systems, and traffic planning and management, etc. Authenticated key agreement schemes are extensively used to secure communications in the ITS environment. However, the existing state-of-the-art schemes are not efficient in terms of performance, are not resilient against potential security attacks, and do not support anonymity, untraceability, and unlinkability. Therefore, we propose the authenticated security framework to secure communication among the participating entities in the ITS environment. It utilizes efficient cryptographic primitives, such as hash function, XOR-operator, ASCON, elliptic curve cryptography, and PUF. It is shown that the proposed framework can be deployed as a robust tool to address the ITS security problems efficiently. Moreover, the proposed framework is lightweight and efficient and can be easily deployed in various ITS applications and other resource-constrained environments. However, the participating entities, such as vehicles and roadside units, must be PUF-enabled to deploy the proposed framework.