A Blockchain-Based Efficient Cross-Domain Authentication Scheme for Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is extensively deployed in outdoor and open environments to effectively address traffic efficiency and safety issues by connecting vehicles to the network. However, due to the open and variable nature of its network topology, vehicles frequently engage in cross-domain interactions. During such processes, directly uploading sensitive information to roadside units for interaction may expose it to malicious tampering or interception by attackers, thus compromising the security of the cross-domain authentication process. Additionally, IoV imposes high real-time requirements, and existing cross-domain authentication schemes for IoV often encounter efficiency issues. To mitigate these challenges, we propose CAIoV, a blockchain-based efficient cross-domain authentication scheme for IoV. This scheme comprehensively integrates technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs, smart contracts, and Merkle hash tree structures. It divides the cross-domain process into anonymous cross-domain authentication and safe cross-domain authentication phases to ensure efficiency while maintaining a balance between efficiency and security. Finally, we evaluate the performance of CAIoV. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed scheme reduces computational overhead by approximately 20%, communication overhead by around 10%, and storage overhead by nearly 30%.