Trust-Based Smart Contract for Automated Agent to Agent Communication

Abstract

Blockchain technology is now regarded as one of the most interesting and possibly innovative technologies. It enables information to be stored and exchanged securely and transparently without the need for a centralized authority to regulate it. Some of the primary benefits of this technology are the atomicity of the stored data. Given its features, this technology has the potential to provide answers to challenges encountered in a very sensitive sector, namely, Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In IoV, vehicles and service providers autonomously capture and produce data without human intervention. This exchanged data must meet certain criteria such as decentralization, automation, security, and stakeholder trust management. To overcome these challenges, the integration of blockchain technology and multi-agent systems is a key solution. Based on smart contracts, the proposed solution consists of exploiting role-based access control (RBAC) and attribute-based access control (ABAC) techniques. This solution removes the central authority (CA) to reduce maintenance costs and eliminate legacy threats from centralized systems. The results, obtained from consumption costs, show that the developed platform is characterized by security, availability, and privacy.