B-HAS: Blockchain-Assisted Efficient Handover Authentication and Secure Communication Protocol in VANETs

The traditional handover authentication protocols in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) suffer from important issues like single source of trust, Single-Point-of-Failure (SPoF), and fails to provide robust authentication due to several potential threats. In state-of-the-art of handover authentication, it takes high computation and communication overhead. The main aim of this paper is to integrate blockchain technology into the VANET system and to design a robust handover authentication protocol to solve the above-mentioned challenges. In this article, we design blockchain-based mutual authentication and session key agreement protocols for intra-vehicular and inter-vehicular (handover case) scenarios by implementing the hash function and Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). We also validate the proposed model by using the Scyther tool and Real-Or-Random (ROR) oracle, standard model. The proposed scheme confirms security against all applicable attacks during security analysis. Furthermore, a detailed comparative analysis reveals that the proposed method has low communication and computation overheads and achieves more functionality features and security attributes than the relevant schemes.