Block4Forensic: An Integrated Lightweight Blockchain Framework for Forensics Applications of Connected Vehicles

Abstract

Today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them. These developments help create smart and connected (e.g., self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies, and maintenance service providers for various applications. One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is forensic analysis of traffic accidents. The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrumental in post-accident scenarios to discover the faulty party, particularly for self-driving vehicles. With the opportunity of being able to access various information in cars, we propose a permissioned blockchain framework among the various elements involved to manage the collected vehicle-related data. Specifically, we first integrate vehicular public key infrastructure (VPKI) to the proposed blockchain to provide membership establishment and privacy. Next, we design a fragmented ledger that will store detailed data related to vehicles such as maintenance information/ history, car diagnosis reports, and so on. The proposed forensic framework enables trustless, traceable, and privacy-aware post-accident analysis with minimal storage and processing overhead.