.png){kind=icon}
.png){kind=icon}
Return
Privacy-Preserving Emergency Vehicle Authentication Scheme Using Zero-Knowledge Proofs and Blockchain
.png){kind=icon}
OA
AI
DOI：10.3390/iot7020035.png)
.png){kind=icon}
Original request for help.png){kind=icon}
Share.png){kind=icon}
Save
Abstract
En 中文
Emergency vehicle authentication in vehicular ad hoc networks must satisfy strict latency, privacy, and trust constraints. Existing Public Key Infrastructure- and Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication-based schemes incur substantial overhead from certificate management and expensive per-hop verification, making them unsuitable for real-time emergency scenarios. We propose a lightweight zero-knowledge- and blockchain-assisted authentication scheme that eliminates certificates, pseudonym pools, and the requirement for online interaction with a trusted authority during the authentication phase. The Certificate Authority (CA) is involved only during offline initialization stages (vehicle enrollment and Merkle tree construction); once provisioning is complete, the runtime authentication process operates without any online CA interaction. Each emergency vehicle registers one-time hash commitments on-chain after proving membership in a category-specific Merkle tree, and authenticates messages by broadcasting a hash along with a zero-knowledge proof of preimage knowledge. Roadside units verify the proof and consult the on-chain state to enforce single-use semantics, creating a tamper-resistant audit trail. Evaluation using the Veins framework (OMNeT++/SUMO) demonstrated a constant 288-byte authenticated payload, millisecond-level end-to-end delay independent of hop count, and stable blockchain processing under sustained load.
Keywords:
vehicular ad hoc networks
emergency vehicle authentication
zero-knowledge proofs
privacy-preserving authentication
lightweight cryptography
blockchain-assisted verification
Merkle tree authorization
trustless multi-hop forwarding
roadside units