Towards a Zero Trust Decentralized Identity Management System for Secure Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

The paper tackles securing cooperative autonomous vehicle (V2X) communications by replacing centralized identity management with a Zero Trust, blockchain-based decentralized identity management (D-IM). It presents a formal BAN logic-based security analysis and qualitative evaluation, plus simulation results in urban and highway scenarios showing limited overhead and preserved network performance. Its contributions include a system model, attacker model, architecture, and identification-and-authorization protocol that enable mutual authentication and fresh session keys without relying on a central authority. Future work points to advanced intrusion detection, decentralized consensus with smart contracts, and adaptive security policies for scalable real-world deployment.

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on pervasive connectivity to enable cooperative and safety-critical applications, but this connectivity also exposes them to a wide range of cybersecurity threats. Existing perimeter-based security and centralized identity management approaches are inadequate for highly dynamic V2X environments, as they depend on implicit trust and suffer from scalability and single-point-of-failure limitations. This paper proposes D-IM, a Zero Trust-based decentralized identity management and authentication framework for secure V2X communication. D-IM integrates continuous verification with a permissioned blockchain to eliminate centralized trust assumptions and enforce explicit, verifiable identity relationships among vehicles and infrastructure. The framework is designed around clear Zero Trust-aligned goals, including mutual authentication, decentralization, privacy protection, non-repudiation, and traceability, and addresses a comprehensive attacker model covering identity, data integrity, collusion, availability, and accountability threats. We present the D-IM system architecture and identification and authorization protocol, and validate its security properties through both qualitative analysis and a formal BAN logic-based verification. Simulation results in urban and highway scenarios using DSRC and C-V2X demonstrate that D-IM introduces limited overhead while preserving network performance, supporting its practicality for real-world AV deployments.

Figures (9)

• Figure 1: Zero Trust Architecture components, adapted from NIST SP 800-207.
• Figure 3: System Steps of the proposed Zero-Trust Blockchain-based Communication Framework.
• Figure 4: Zero-Trust Decentralized Blockchain-based Identification and Authorization Protocol.
• Figure 5: Urban Environment Layout used
• Figure 6: (a) Highway Packet Reception Rate and (b) Urban Packet Reception Rate vs. the distance using DSRC RAT and average packet size required by our implementation (c) Highway Packet Reception Rate and (d) Urban Packet Reception Rate vs. the distance using LTE-V2X RAT and average packet size required by our implementation.