Blockchain-based Trust Management in Security Credential Management System for Vehicular Network

2025-02-21

AI Summary

To address privacy leakage and privilege misuse risks arising from multi-authority collaboration in vehicular networks, this paper proposes a blockchain-based decentralized secure credential management mechanism. The approach deeply integrates blockchain into the Security Credential Management System (SCMS) architecture for the first time, leveraging Hyperledger Fabric’s permissioned blockchain and custom smart contracts to enable on-chain, autonomous policy generation, certificate chain aggregation, and trust auditing—thereby eliminating reliance on centralized policy generators inherent in traditional distributed PKI. A lightweight certificate chain management protocol is designed to ensure end-entity authentication validity and full-path behavioral traceability. Experimental results demonstrate system throughput in the tens of transactions per second (TPS), with bounded certificate chain and ledger sizes, significantly enhancing accountability, transparency, and resilience against single points of failure.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Representing, Reasoning, and Using Provenance, Trust
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Blockchains and distributed ledgers
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Semantics and Knowledge: Provenance, trust, security and privacy, and ethical issues in managing semantic data

Abstract

Cellular networking is advancing as a wireless technology to support diverse applications in vehicular communication, enabling vehicles to interact with various applications to enhance the driving experience, even when managed by different authorities. Security Credential Management System (SCMS) is the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for vehicular networking and the state-of-the-art distributed PKI to protect the privacy-preserving vehicular networking against an honest-but-curious authority using multiple authorities and to decentralize the trust management. We build a Blockchain-Based Trust Management (BBTM) to provide even greater decentralization and security. Specifically, BBTM uses the blockchain to 1) replace the existing Policy Generator (PG), 2) manage the policy of each authority in SCMS, 3) aggregate the Global Certificate Chain File (GCCF), and 4) provide greater accountability and transparency on the aforementioned functionalities. We implement BBTM on Hyperledger Fabric using a smart contract for experimentation and analyses. Our experiments show that BBTM is lightweight in processing, efficient management in the certificate chain and ledger size, supports a bandwidth of multiple transactions per second, and provides validated end-entities.

Problem

• Blockchain-based trust management for vehicular networks
• Decentralizing Security Credential Management System (SCMS)
• Enhancing privacy and accountability in vehicular communications

Innovation

• Blockchain-Based Trust Management
• Hyperledger Fabric implementation
• Smart contract for policy management