Proof-of-Travel: A Protocol for Trustworthy V2I Communication and Incentive Designs

Abstract

Previous work on misbehavior detection and trust management can identify falsified and malicious Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) messages and enable witness vehicles to report their observations to the trust authority for certificate management. However, there may not exist enough “benign” vehicles with V2X connectivity or vehicle owners who are willing to opt-in at an early stage of connected vehicle deployment. In this paper, we propose a security protocol for Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication, titled Proof-of- Travel (POT), to answer the research question: How can we transform the power of cryptography techniques embedded within the protocol into social and economic mechanisms to simultaneously incentivize V2X adoption and determine the trustworthiness of V2I data? The POT protocol determines the trust of a vehicle based on its distance traveled and the V2I information the vehicle has shared along the path of its movement. Additionally, the total vehicle mileage traveled by the vehicle must be testified by the digital signatures from infrastructure components in the vehicle's trajectory. Targeting rationale attackers motivated by profit-seeking behaviors, the POT protocol creates burdens for malicious vehicles who must acquire chains of proofs for compulsory spatial movement to gain reputation. However, the protocol does not incur extra cost for a normal vehicle who naturally moves from the origin to the destination. Instead, the verifiable vehicle mileage traveled by the normal vehicle can be used to determine its contributions and stake in the system as the altruistic behaviors of sharing observations about traffic events can benefit the transportation network. We show how to use the POT protocol to construct voting-based consensus algorithms to decide the authenticity and the correctness of vehicle-reported events and present initial simulation results.