A blockchain technology for protection and probative value preservation of vehicle driver data

Abstract

The number of sensors in cars and other vehicles has significantly increased in the last few years. Such sensors are used to monitor vehicle telemetry as well as driver's biometric and physiological data, with the aim of increasing the safety of people and decreasing the number of accidents. Data monitored by these sensors may also be used by insurance companies or police for accident, or more in general, event reconstruction. Whatever is the use, this data should be protected against cybersecurity attacks in order to guarantee the privacy of the drivers, and to prevent malicious modifications performed with the aim of cheating the insurance companies or police. The goal of this paper is to propose a framework, based on a permissioned blockchain, that allows to both guarantee driver data protection and evidential property of data. The scenario explored considers data recorded inside the car, encrypted and transferred to a cloud storage service. The encrypted version of the data is also hashed and hash is stored in the blockchain, to guarantee data integrity and inalterability. At the same time, the blockchain can be used as an official ledger for preserving the probative value of data.