V2I-Aided zk-SNARK for Travel Records Verification of Electric Vehicles

The rapid increase in the number of electric vehicles (EVs) has resulted in huge fuel tax losses for governments every year. Many countries have levied taxes based on the annual or monthly travel record (TR) submitted by the EV. On the one hand, TR contains important private information, such as the time, locations, and trajectories of EV owners. On the other hand, EV owners may forge TR to reduce taxes. Therefore, the verification protocol of TR requires extremely high security and effectiveness. To solve this outstanding issue, this paper proposes a V2I-SNARK protocol that combines vehicle-to-infrastructure communications (V2I) and zk-SNARK for TR verification of EVs. V2I-SNARK is divided into two stages, the trusted setup stage and the TR verification stage. In the former stage, a trusted authority (TA) will generate the proof key and verification key for verification and store them on the verification server (Verifier). In the latter stage, EV will use the proof key to generate a randomized proof, and the verifier will use the verification key to verify the proof. Regarding the performance of the V2I-SNARK protocol, we first provide security proofs for completeness, soundness, and zero-knowledge properties. Furthermore, we compare the verification efficiency, energy consumption, computational complexity, and other performance of V2I-SNARK with the benchmark protocols. The results show that the proposed V2I-SNARK protocol outperforms other protocols in terms of verification efficiency and energy consumption.