LCAA: Lightweight Conditional Anonymous Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Carbon Emissions Environment

Since the signing of the Paris Agreement, "combating climate change and reducing carbon emissions" has emerged as a global focal point. The transportation industry, as a substantial contributor to carbon emissions, has posed a critical research challenge of efficiently and accurately quantifying vehicle carbon emissions while safeguarding vehicle privacy. Therefore, to realize lightweight conditional anonymous authentication, accurate statistics of vehicle carbon emissions and to inspire vehicle owners to travel with low carbon, this study proposes a lightweight conditional anonymous authentication scheme for vehicular carbon emissions environment. In this work, we introduce a lightweight certificate authorization mechanism for issuing vehicle certificates that avoids problems, such as key escrow, certificate management, and public key replacement attacks. Additionally, we combine the chameleon hash functions and elliptic curve digital signatures to devise an efficient anonymous identity authentication algorithm. This algorithm aims to authenticate vehicle anonymous identities while verifying the integrity of messages. Simultaneously, each vehicle possesses both long-term and short-term anonymity. Nevertheless, system administrators can trace short-term anonymity to obtain long-term anonymity. The lite certificate authority can use long-term anonymity to recover the real identity of vehicles, thus achieving conditional identity privacy. Furthermore, we use blockchain to record the carbon emissions of vehicles and achieve accurate carbon emissions statistics. To promote public participation and encourage low-carbon travel, we design an incentive mechanism allowing vehicles to sell their excess carbon quotas for financial gain. Finally, through theoretical analysis and experimental simulation, we demonstrate that the scheme has advantages in communication and computation.