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

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.