Abstract
In the era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, cybercriminals are targeting critical infrastructures such as traffic light systems and smart grids. A major concern is the security of such systems, which can be broken down into a number of categories, such as the authentication of data collection devices, secure data transmission, and use of the data by authorized and authenticated parties. The majority of research studies in the literature have largely focused on data integrity and user authentication. So far, no published work has addressed the security of a traffic light system from data collection to data access. Furthermore, it is evident that the conventional cloud computing architecture is incapable of analyzing and managing the massive amount of generated data. As a result, the fog computing paradigm combined with blockchain technology may be the best way to ensure data privacy in a decentralized manner while reducing overheads, latency, and maintaining security. This paper presents a blockchain-based authentication scheme named VDAS using the fog computing paradigm. The formal and informal verifications of the proposed solution are presented. The evaluation of the proposed scheme VDAS showed that it has low communication and computation costs compared to existing lightweight authentication techniques.