The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a new paradigm for vehicular networks. Using diverse access methods, IoV enables vehicles to connect with their surroundings. However, without data security, IoV settings might be hazardous. Because of the IoV's openness and self-organization, they are prone to malevolent attack. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a revolutionary blockchain-enabled game theory-based authentication mechanism for securing IoVs. Here, a three layer multi-trusted authorization solution is provided in which authentication of vehicles can be performed from initial entry to movement into different trusted authorities' areas without any delay by the use of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in the beginning and later through duel gaming, and a dynamic Proof-of-Work (dPoW) consensus mechanism. Formal and informal security analyses justify the framework's credibility in more depth with mathematical proofs. A rigorous comparative study demonstrates that the suggested framework achieves greater security and functionality characteristics and provides lower transaction and computation overhead than many of the available solutions so far. However, these solutions never considered the prime concerns of physical cloning and side-channel attacks. However, the framework in this paper is capable of handling them along with all the other security attacks the previous work can handle. Finally, the suggested framework has been subjected to a blockchain implementation to demonstrate its efficacy with duel gaming to achieve authentication in addition to its capability of using lower burdened blockchain at the physical layer, which current blockchain-based authentication models for IoVs do not support.
Bi-Ying Wang, Zheng Chang, Shancang Li, Timo Hämäläinen
Recently, integrating satellite networks (e.g., low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellation) into the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem has emerged as a potential paradigm to provide more reliable, ubiquitous, and seamless network services. The LEO satellite networks serves as a key enabler to transform the connectivity across industries and geographical border. Despite the convenience brought from the LEO satellite networks, it arises security concerns, in which the essential one is to secure the communication between the IoT devices and the LEO satellite network. However, some challenges inheriting from the LEO satellite networks need to be considered, which are: the dynamic topology; the resource-constraint satellites; the relative long latency; and multiple beams authentication. In particular, the centralized authentication schemes are no longer suitable for the emerging LEO satellite-assisted IoT ecosystem. In this article, we first introduce the architecture of the LEO satellite network-assisted IoT ecosystem. Then, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving blockchain-based authentication scheme. The proposed authentication scheme takes the advantages of certificateless encryption and consortium blockchain to provide lightweight key pair computation without appealing devices’ information and efficient signature querying and verification. In addition, a fast authentication mechanism is implemented in the scheme in order to reduce the time complexity from querying a certain record for the authentication within a satellite among multiple beams. With the analysis of the storage and computation complexity, the performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
With the advent of modern technologies, including the IoT and blockchain, smart-parking (SP) systems are becoming smarter and smarter. Similar to other automated systems, and particularly those that require automation or minimal interaction with humans, the SP system is heuristic in delivering performances, such as throughput in terms of latency, efficiency, privacy, and security, and it is considered a long-term cost-effective solution. This study looks ahead to future trends and developments in SP systems and presents an inclusive, long-term, effective, and well-performing smart autonomous vehicle parking (SAVP) system that explores and employs the emerging fog-computing and blockchain technologies as robust solutions to strengthen the existing collaborative IoT-cloud platform to build and manage SP systems for autonomous vehicles (AVs). In other words, the proposed SAVP system offers a smart-parking solution, both indoors and outdoors, and mainly for AVs looking for vacant parking, wherein the fog nodes act as a middleware layer that provides various parking operations closer to IoT-enabled edge devices. To address the challenges of privacy and security, a lightweight integrated blockchain and cryptography (LIBC) module is deployed, which is functional at each fog node, to authorize and grant access to the AVs in every phase of parking (e.g., from the parking entrance to the parking slot to the parking exit). A proof-of-concept implementation was conducted, wherein the overall computed results, such as the average response time, efficiency, privacy, and security, were examined as highly efficient to enable a proven SAVP system. This study also examined an innovative pace, with careful considerations to combatting the existing SP-system challenges and, therefore, to building and managing future scalable SP systems.
Baofeng Ji, Mingkun Zhang, Ling Xing, Xiaoli Li · 7 authors
The huge increase in the communication network rate has made the application fields and scenarios for vehicular ad hoc networks more abundant and diversified and proposed more requirements for the efficiency and quality of data transmission. To improve the limited communication distance and poor communication quality of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), an optimal intelligent routing algorithm is proposed in this paper. Combined multi-weight decision algorithm with the greedy perimeter stateless routing protocol, designed and evaluated standardized function for link stability. Linear additive weighting is used to optimize link stability and distance to improve the packet delivery rate of the IoV. The blockchain system is used as the storage structure for relay data, and the smart contract incentive algorithm based on machine learning is used to encourage relay vehicles to provide more communication bandwidth for data packet transmission. The proposed scheme is simulated and analyzed under different scenarios and different parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the packet loss rate and improve system performance.
With the development of electric vehicle (EV) technology, EV has become a key component in the future smart grid. Due to the sheer large number of EVs on the road, the emerging vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which allows for two-way electrical flows between EVs and the power grid, is gaining traction. However, establishing a fair and private electricity exchange scheme has gradually become a critical challenge. The emergence of blockchain technology offers a novel approach for resolving this issue. In this study, we overview the opportunities and challenges of blockchain in the smart grid. Then, we provide a privacy-preserving blockchain-based electricity auction scheme for V2G networks in smart grid. In particular, we exploit PS group signatures to keep the privacy of EVs or charging stations and leverage blockchain to provide automated auction execution. With our mechanism, the identity of EV/charging station is conditionally protected. In case of an emergency, the trusted authority (i.e., the group manager) can open the identity. Meanwhile, we present the security analysis to prove our scheme’s security. Finally, we implement the experiment to evaluate efficiency. The experimental results show that our proposal is efficient and suitable for V2G networks.
Location-Based Services (LBSs) are essential in many application contexts like ride-sharing or navigation apps. There are cases where users could gain an advantage by submitting fake locations. The problem faced in this paper concerns the possibility that the geographic location declared by a user is not the actual location in which the user is placed. Some solutions are based on centralized or distributed verification in the literature, and other solutions are based on witnesses or infrastructure. In this paper, we highlight the limitations of such approaches and propose a new scheme that exploits signals coming from satellites to provide trustworthy location proofs, also respecting users' privacy. The proposed approach is decentralized because location proofs are stored by users in a suitably-encrypted way, and a blockchain is adopted to guarantee data integrity and authenticity. We show that the proposed approach overcomes the state of the art through a detailed analysis.
A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is essential in building an intelligent transportation system that optimizes traffic conditions and makes traffic information conveniently accessible. However, malicious vehicles may disrupt the traffic order via propagating forged traffic/road information. Therefore, using digital certificates based on cryptography, some existing authentication schemes were proposed to manage vehicles’ identities. At first glance, these schemes can effectively identify malicious vehicles. However, these schemes require more computation and storage resources to maintain certificates. This is because the data storage of the database increases in a near-linear trend as the number of certificates grows. In this paper, we propose an efficient blockchain-based authentication scheme for secure communication in VANET (EBAS) to address the aforementioned issues. In EBAS, the regional trusted authority (RTA) receives traffic messages uploaded by the vehicle, together with transactions constructed via the unspent transaction output (UTXO) model. The verifier checks the legitimacy of the single input contained in the uploaded transaction to verify the legitimacy of the message sender’s identity. In terms of privacy preservation, a asymmetric key encryption technique, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), is applied for constructing the transaction pseudonym, and users participate in the authentication process anonymously. In addition, our scheme guarantees the scalability of EBAS by proposing a transaction update mechanism, which can keep data storage at a stable level rather than near-linear growth. Under the simulation, the retrieving overhead remains at approximately 0.32 ms while the storage cost is stable at around 32.7 M for the blockchain state database. In terms of authentication efficiency, the average overhead of the proposed scheme is around 0.942 ms, which outperforms the existing schemes.
Abdul Rehman Javed, Muhammad Abul Hassan, Faisal Shahzad, Waqas Ahmed · 7 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) revitalizes the world with tremendous capabilities and potential to be utilized in vehicular networks. The Smart Transport Infrastructure (STI) era depends mainly on the IoT. Advanced machine learning (ML) techniques are being used to strengthen the STI smartness further. However, some decisions are very challenging due to the vast number of STI components and big data generated from STIs. Computation cost, communication overheads, and privacy issues are significant concerns for wide-scale ML adoption within STI. These issues can be addressed using Federated Learning (FL) and blockchain. FL can be used to address the issues of privacy preservation and handling big data generated in STI management and control. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that can store data while providing trust and integrity assurance. Blockchain can be a solution to data integrity and can add more security to the STI. This survey initially explores the vehicular network and STI in detail and sheds light on the blockchain and FL with real-world implementations. Then, FL and blockchain applications in the Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) environment from security and privacy perspectives are discussed in detail. In the end, the paper focuses on the current research challenges and future research directions related to integrating FL and blockchain for vehicular networks.
Mishri Saleh Al-Marshoud, Ali H. Al‐Bayatti, Mehmet Sabır Kiraz
Security and privacy in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are challenging in terms of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) features. The distribution and decentralisation of vehicles could threaten location privacy and confidentiality in the absence of trusted third parties (TTP)s or if they are otherwise compromised. If the same digital signatures (or the same certificates) are used for different communications, then adversaries could easily apply linking attacks. Unfortunately, most of the existing schemes for VANETs in the literature do not satisfy the required levels of security, location privacy, and efficiency simultaneously. This paper presents a new and efficient end-to-end anonymous key exchange protocol based on Yang et al. 's self-blindable signatures. In our protocol, vehicles first privately blind their own private certificates for each communication outside the mix-zone and then compute an anonymous shared key based on zero-knowledge proof of knowledge (PoK). The efficiency comes from the fact that once the signatures are verified, the ephemeral values in PoK are also used to compute a shared key through an authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. Therefore, the protocol does not require any further external information to generate a shared key. Our protocol also does not require an interference with the Roadside Units or Certificate Authorities, and hence can be securely run outside the mixed-zones. We demonstrate the security of our protocol in an ideal/real simulation paradigm. Hence, our protocol achieves secure authentication, forward unlinkability, and accountability. Furthermore, the performance analysis shows that our protocol is more efficient in terms of computational and communication overheads compared to existing schemes.
The Internet of Vehicles is deployed in an open environment, and protecting its security and data privacy is the challenge. Carrying out the Internet of Vehicles secure authentication before interaction of information is an important part of ensuring the security foundation. Therefore, this article designs a safe and reliable Internet of Vehicles authentication and key agreement schemeassisted by blockchain. This article uses a multi-TA network model to improve the efficiency of authentication. Because of the rapid movement of vehicles, it will continue to appear cross-RSU and TA certification. Considering the disadvantages of most centralised authentication protocols using a single TA, this paper uses the multi-TA model to improve the efficiency of authentication. By usingblockchain technology to store the authentication information of vehicles, the cross-domain authentication of vehicles and the protection of user privacy information can be well realised. At the same time, in order to reduce the time of vehicle authentication, this scheme uses a lightweight calculation operation to complete the whole process of authentication. Through security analysis and results of Proverif simulation, the security of the solution is well proved, our scheme can resist various common attacks. Compared with some existing Internet of Vehicles security authentication protocols, the proposed scheme has a lower cost of computation, communication, and storage.
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential integration with the traditional Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we have witnessed the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which promises to seamlessly integrate into smart transportation systems. However, the key characteristics of IoV, such as high-speed mobility and frequent disconnections make it difficult to manage its security and privacy. The Blockchain, as a distributed tamper-resistant ledge, has been proposed as an innovative solution that guarantees privacy-preserving yet secure schemes. In this paper, we review recent literature on the application of blockchain to IoV, in particular, and intelligent transportation systems in general.
In the last decade, the Internet of Things has witnessed exponential growth in demand and development. The growth of IoT and the increasing need for automation have led to an exciting application in the transportation industry, namely the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Simply put, IoV systems are vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) enhanced by integrating them with automation over the internet. As briefly discussed in this paper, the IoV systems guarantee various advantages like a much safer and more efficient future. However, the primary challenge at hand is implementing IoV at the end-user level. Of the varied building blocks present on the road to the development of IoV, secure data transfer is an essential requirement, especially with recent advances in quantum computing. IOTA is a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) specifically designed to secure IoT data transmissions. This paper discusses the advantages of implementing IOTA for secure and private IoV systems. The paper suggests replacing IOTA’s current post-quantum signature scheme Winternitz One Time Signature (W-OTS) with CRYSTALS Dilithium. These two post-quantum signature schemes are evaluated against each other to establish that employing Dilithium reduces both latency and signature space required, bringing a significant improvement to IOTA. This improvisation is beneficial, especially for the fast-paced functioning of IoV environments.
Recent advances in wireless technology and embedded systems enable vehicles to share relevant traffic-related data to improve the transportation Quality-of-Service (QoS). However, due to the ubiquitousness of cyber-attacks, it is challenging to ensure the integrity of the data collected from cars. This paper proposes a novel architecture for road traffic events management in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) relying on a permissioned blockchain . It also introduces the concept of micro-transactions to minimize communication and storage overhead . Through simulations, a rigorous performance evaluation of the proposed approach was conducted, and the micro-transactions effectiveness was assessed. In addition, a comparison with close works in the literature was performed. The proposed scheme ensures road traffic records integrity and traceability, and simulation results on the considered scenarios showed good performance .
Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs), a special kind of Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), play an important role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Via wireless technology, vehicles exchange information related to road conditions and their status, and, thereby, VANETs enhance transportation safety and efficiency. A critical aspect of VANETs is providing privacy for the vehicles. The employment of pseudonym certificates is a well-known solution to the privacy problems in VANETs. However, certificate management faces challenges in renewing certificates and revoking vehicles. The centralized certificate management, especially resulting in the delay of the revocation process, harms the nodes of VANETs. This paper proposes a blockchain structure-based certificate management for VANETs and voting-based revocation to halt misbehaving vehicles’ actions. Moreover, this paper presents extended privacy for the participants of the voting process using ring signatures.
Abdulghafour Mohammad, Sergio Vargas, Pavel Čermák
Today’s cars can share data with other cars, automakers, and service providers. Shared data can help improve the driving experience, the performance of the car, and the traffic situations. Among all data-collection techniques, blockchain technology offers an immutable and secure solution to support data collection in the automotive industry. Despite its advantages, collecting auto data with blockchain still faces several challenges. Thus, the purpose of this study was to conduct a review of published articles that have addressed the challenges of adopting blockchain for data collection in the automotive industry. This paper allowed us to answer the predefined research question: “What are the challenges of using blockchain for data collection in the automotive industry as presented in the published literature?” The review included articles published from 2017 to January 2022, and from the screened records, 13 articles were analyzed in full-text form. The founded challenges were categorized into seven categories: connectivity, privacy, security attacks, scalability, performance, costs, and monetizing. This review will help researchers, car manufacturers, and third-party suppliers to assess the applicability of the blockchain for data collection.
Abstract Blockchain-based systems, coined by distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), have rapidly received tremendous interest from academia, industries, and governments. Recent literature has revealed many research and developments on applying DLTs to the Internet of things (IoT), cloud-edge computing. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the newly appeared concepts, theories, platforms, and DLTs-facilitated applications of vehicular networks and mobile edge computing (MEC). We also review the selections of the available DLTs related platforms and tools. Future research directions and issues are discussed, including security, privacy, scalability issues, and multiple applications in various domains.
Sudan Jha, Nishant Jha, Deepak Prashar, Sultan Ahmad · 6 authors
Autonomous vehicles offer various advantages to both vehicle owners and automobile companies. However, despite the advantages, there are various risks associated with these vehicles. These vehicles interact with each other by forming a vehicular network, also known as VANET, in a centralized manner. This centralized network is vulnerable to cyber-attacks which can cause data loss, resulting in road accidents. Thus, to prevent the vehicular network from being attacked and to prevent the privacy of the data, key management is used. However, key management alone over a centralized network is not effective in ensuring data integrity in a vehicular network. To resolve this issue, various studies have introduced a blockchain-based approach and enabled key management over a decentralized network. This technique is also found effective in ensuring the privacy of all the stakeholders involved in a vehicular network. Furthermore, a blockchain-based key management system can also help in storing a large amount of data over a distributed network, which can encourage a faster exchange of information between vehicles in a network. However, there are certain limitations of blockchain technology that may affect the efficient working of autonomous vehicles. Most of the existing blockchain-based systems are implemented over Ethereum or Bitcoin. The transaction-processing capability of these blockchains is in the range of 5 to 20 transactions per second, whereas hashgraphs are capable of processing thousands of transactions per second as the data are processed exponentially. Furthermore, a hashgraph prevents the user from altering the order of the transactions being processed, and they do not need high computational powers to operate, which may help in reducing the overall cost of the system. Due to the advantages offered by a hashgraph, an advanced key management framework based on a hashgraph for secure communication between the vehicles is suggested in this paper. The framework is developed using the concept of Leaving of Vehicles based on a Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) and Batch Rekeying. The system is tested and compared with other closely related systems on the basis of the transaction compilation time and change in traffic rates.
Muhammad Saad, Muhammad Khalid Khan, Maaz Bin Ahmad
This systematic literature review provides an extensive categorization of the blockchain-enabled applications across the domain of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Within the paradigm of distributed ledger technology (DLT), the communication models and practices for VANETs have been revolutionized. An analytical review and a survey were conducted to explore the advancements of blockchain and VANETs. The techniques, limitations, and advantages of blockchain deployment in VANETs are discussed for the effective implementation of a decentralized network. To this end, 68 studies were selected on the basis of the procedural steps to provide a comprehensive overview of blockchain and the smart contracts in VANETs. In particular, a decentralized communication model is also proposed for the advanced implementation of blockchain in VANETs. Researchers and practitioners are being attracted to these technologies for applications for various industrial sectors. Therefore, this study also emphasizes the identification of any blockchain-related open issues for future prospects. The comprehension of blockchain applications for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is also explored in order to fill the research gap on advanced communication networks across the Internet of Things.
Through information sharing, vehicles can know the surrounding road condition information timely in Vehicular Adhoc Networks. To ensure the validity of these messages and the security of vehicles, the message authentication, privacy-preserving, and delay problems are three important issues. Although many conditional privacy-preserving authentication schemes have been proposed to ensure secure communication, there still exist some imperfections such as frequent interactions or unlinkability. From this, our paper proposes a novel hierarchical blockchain-assisted authentication scheme to solve these existing issues comprehensively. First, unlinkability is achieved by a dynamic key derivation algorithm. Second, the proposed scheme can reduce correlation processing delay, queuing delay, and deployment costs by adopting hierarchical Vehicle Fog Computing. Third, cross-region authentication is achieved by taking advantage of the properties of blockchain. In addition, we demonstrate our scheme can fulfill the security criteria of the Vehicular Adhoc Network by security analysis. Furthermore, the simulations are carried out to show its availability by using JAVA and NS-3. The findings reveal that the suggested method outperforms earlier schemes in terms of computation cost and communication cost. All in all, making the authentication scheme more efficient and concise is the focus of our future research.
Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are one of the pillars of the Internet of Vehicles, they provide plenty of applications ranging from safety to entertainment. Safety applications largely depend on reliable and authentic traffic-related data. However, ensuring the data reliability and authenticity is facing many challenges due mainly to the scalability of VANETs such as the high speed, the long roads, and the open nature of VANETs. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a decentralized Blockchain-based trust management framework (BC-TMF) aiming to compute trust metrics for vehicles. These trust metrics rely on the authenticity of the messages. Each vehicle assesses the authenticity of the received messages in real-time, calculates a local trust metric for the originator of such messages, then shares it with a miner. Periodically each miner aggregates the received trust metrics into global trust metrics, then packs them in a block. To investigate the efficiency and consistency of the proposed framework, extensive simulations are conducted. The obtained results show that the proposed BC-TMF has an excellent capability in computing accurate trust metrics for vehicles. Besides, it outperforms the existing ones in terms of the accuracy of computed trust metrics, particularly for malicious vehicles.
The air traffic management (ATM) system is an intelligent system that integrates the ground computer network, the airborne network, and the space satellite (communication and navigation) network. It has remarkable characteristics of cyber-physical system (CPS). The development of ATM system is inseparable from the application of new technologies. This paper proposes a security framework based on blockchain for CPS in the ATM system. Through the research on the characteristics of blockchain and CPS, this paper analyzes the necessity of integrating them into the research of the ATM system, demonstrates the feasibility of combining them, and then constructs the ATMChain framework mechanism to realize the in-depth integration of blockchain and CPS in ATM. On this basis, this paper gives the overall design architecture and implementation steps of the scheme. In addition, this paper also makes a series of analysis and demonstration from the perspective of scheme security. The research scheme will help to improve the security, reliability, and scalability of ATM services and provide a new reference for establishing a more security and efficient ATM system.
With the rapid development of the informatization and industrialization of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the number and application of connected vehicles are growing rapidly. The safety problem is related to the property and life of human beings, which has attracted extensive attention from academic and industrial circles. Based on the study of high-quality literature published in the past decade and other high-level research works, this paper first analyzes the forms of attack against the Internet of Vehicles from the two aspects of attack mode and target. Then, it summarizes the existing blockchain-based system framework of the Internet of Vehicles (BIoV) and then discusses the security solutions of blockchain-based vehicles from the aspects of authentication, privacy, trust management, access control, and so on, to support the distributed system architecture and solve the security challenges of the Internet of Vehicles. Finally, the technical difficulties and the direction of further research of BIoV are summarized.
Vehicular Ad-hoc networks (VANETs) during the communication process, nodes are always varying and the process is always under security threats like Sybil attacks, masquerading attacks, etc. In order to reduce the probability of these attacks and to regulate traffic flow in the network, a software-defined network (SDN) is used. The SDN is used for implementing protocols like OpenFlow and reducing the routing load in the network, but it doesn’t provide a high level of security to the network, hence protocols like encryption, hashing, etc. are applied to the VANET. In the paper, SDN based blockchain-inspired algorithm is implemented, which coordinates network traffic and improves the overall security of the network. Security analysis of the proposed algorithm shows that the combination of blockchain with encrypted SDN is removing more than 95% of the network attacks as compared to its non-blockchain counterparts.
Abstract Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are characterized by high mobility of nodes and volatility, which make privacy, trust management, and security challenging issues in VANETs' design. In such networks, data can be exposed to a variety of attacks, the most dangerous is false information dissemination, which threatens the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. False emergency messages can be injected by inside attackers to announce fake incidents such as traffic accidents, resulting in a false information attack. As the data in VANET is based on events, any trust mechanism must first identify the true events. To address these security challenges, a blockchain‐based authentication scheme and trust management model are proposed for VANETs. Using the authentication scheme, vehicles are enabled to send messages anonymously to the roadside units (RSUs) and the identity privacy of vehicles is protected. Besides, the proposed trust management model is designed to detect and deal with false information by evaluating the trustworthiness of vehicles and data. Using the trust model, when vehicles report an incident to the nearest RSU, the RSU is able to verify whether or not the incident took place. This mechanism ensures that RSUs send only verified event notifications. Finally, RSUs participate in updating the trust values of vehicles and store these values in the blockchain. The efficiency of the proposed authentication scheme is validated through analysis while the trust model is validated through simulations. The results obtained show that the proposed authentication scheme and the trust model provide better performance than other state‐of‐the‐art models where malicious vehicles can be identified efficiently and RSUs are enabled to broadcast only legitimate events.