Secure Blockchain-Based Communication Scheme for Connected Vehicles

Abstract

Autonomous connected vehicles are a main concept in the future of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) since they provide an increase in safety and road efficiency. The management and coordination of the connected vehicles is based on periodic communications among the vehicles involved in the network, and with their surrounding environment. However, a major concern regarding this information sharing process is how to provide a secure transmission while fulfilling the latency requirements. Here we propose the use of a joint paradigm to securely manage the inter-vehicular communications. First, a ring-signature based scheme is applied to verify the identity of the vehicles joining the network. Second, the information is shared among the vehicles and consensually verified using a blockchain-based mechanism using secure communication channels created by multi-party smart contracts. The proposed protocol fulfills the stringent requirements in latency for vehicular networks by means of almost instantaneous communications while providing an anonymous secure system for the members of the network relying on cryptographic primitives.