A Secure and Efficient Distributed Authentication Scheme for IoV with Reputation-Driven Consensus and SM9

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) operates in highly dynamic and open network environments and faces serious challenges in secure and real-time authentication and consensus mechanisms. Existing methods often suffer from complex certificate management, inefficient consensus protocols, and poor resilience in high-frequency communication, resulting in high latency, poor scalability, and unstable network performance. To address these issues, this paper proposes a secure and efficient distributed authentication scheme for IoV with reputation-driven consensus and SM9. First, this paper proposes a decentralized authentication architecture that utilizes the certificate-free feature of SM9, enabling lightweight authentication and key negotiation, thereby reducing the complexity of key management. To ensure the traceability and global consistency of authentication data, this scheme also integrates blockchain technology, applying its inherent invariance. Then, this paper introduces a reputation-driven dynamic node grouping mechanism that transparently evaluates and groups’ node behavior using smart contracts to enhance network stability. Furthermore, a new RBSFT (Reputation-Based SM9 Friendly-Tolerant) consensus mechanism is proposed for the first time to enhance consensus efficiency by optimizing the PBFT algorithm. RBSFT aims to write authentication information into the blockchain ledger to achieve multi-level optimization of trust management and decision-making efficiency, thereby significantly improving the responsiveness and robustness in high-frequency IoV scenarios. Experimental results show that it excels in authentication, communication efficiency, and computational cost control, making it a feasible solution for achieving IoV security and real-time performance.