Towards byzantine fault-tolerant non-interactive zero knowledge cross-domain batch authentication in VANET

Abstract

Vehicle Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is becoming an essential vehicle communication network paradigm. However, the safe and reliable operation of VANETs faces serious challenges, especially in how users authenticate to the network. Idealized access control rules for trusted network entities are highly susceptible to the leakage of critical private data from inbound users. In addition, the open network environment puts the security of networked entities at significant risk, and the presence of Byzantine devices severely hampers legitimate vehicles from requesting network access services. To address the above problems, this paper proposes an efficient vehicle cross-domain identity batch authentication framework that is functional, privacy-preserving, and resistant to Byzantine attacks. The scheme uses non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs to achieve anonymous vehicle authentication. We integrate an improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) protocol to enhance the robustness of zero-knowledge authentication. It achieves efficient consensus for inbound vehicle authentication in cross-domain scenarios, even in the presence of a small number of Byzantine entities. The scheme is further integrated into cross-domain authentication frameworks to support seamless inter-domain access. Under dynamic VANET topologies, we derive consensus probability and authentication accuracy; simulations confirm high accuracy with low communication overhead.