Blockchain-Based Partial Group Key Agreement Protocol for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Communication technologies have grown fast over the previous decade, resulting in substantial breakthroughs in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) applications and services. ITS is distinguished by high node mobility and instability, making confidentiality, security, and privacy a difficult challenge to address in its implementation. Even though several researchers have suggested authenticated key agreement protocols for secure transmission, significant flaws can still be observed. Moreover, this research presents a unique blockchain-based group key agreement protocol to address these complex challenges. The proposed protocol can minimize processing latency, deployment costs, and queuing delay by utilizing RSU as a semi-trusted entity. Moreover, blockchain characteristics accomplish inter-regional authentication. We show that the proposed protocol is secure against known security threats, which we proved formally. In addition, the performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol has considerably less communication and computational overhead than other existing protocols. Furthermore, the simulations are performed on NS-3 to demonstrate the practical aspects of the proposed protocol.