In distributed environments, such as distributed ledgers technologies and other peer-to-peer architectures, communication represents a crucial topic. The ability to efficiently disseminate contents is strongly influenced by the type of system architecture, the protocol used to spread such contents over the network and the actual dynamicity of the communication links (i.e. static vs. temporal nets). In particular, the dissemination strategies either focus on achieving an optimal coverage, minimizing the network traffic or providing assurances on anonymity (that is a fundamental requirement of many cryptocurrencies). In this work, the behaviour of multiple dissemination protocols is discussed and studied through simulation. The performance evaluation has been carried out on temporal networks with the help of LUNES-temporal, a discrete event simulator that allows to test algorithms running on a distributed environment. The experiments show that some gossip protocols allow to either save a considerable number of messages or to provide better anonymity guarantees, at the cost of a little lower coverage achieved and/or a little increase of the delivery time.
Due to the distributed and dynamic characteristics of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and the continuous growth in the number of devices, content-centric decentralized vehicular named data networking (VNDN) has become more suitable for content-oriented applications in IoV. However, the existing centralized architecture is prone to the failure of single points, which results in trust problems in key verification between cross-domain nodes and consuming more power and reducing the lifetime. Focusing on secure key management and power-efficient routing, this article proposes a blockchain-based key management and green routing scheme for VNDN. A blockchain-based key management scheme is presented to achieve secure and efficient distribution and verification of keys. Specifically, all trusted agencies (TAs) form a consortium blockchain for storing public key hashes to ensure the authenticity of users’ public keys. A green global routing scheme based on node relaying pressure (GGNRP) is proposed to save power consumption and reduce the forwarding delay. A new node relay pressure metric is introduced to assist with routing decisions. Detailed experiments and analysis show that, compared with the existing scheme, the proposed scheme can achieve secure key management and GGNRP can decrease the power consumption and average delay by 15.8% and 63.2%, respectively.
Sonia Alice George, Steffie Maria Stephen, Arunita Jaekel
A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) consists of vehicles, roadside units, and other infrastructures that communicate with each other with the goal of improving road safety, reducing accidents, and alleviating traffic congestion. For safe and secure operation of critical applications in VANET, it is essential to ensure that only authenticated vehicles can participate in the network. Another important requirement for VANET communication is that the privacy of vehicles and their users must be protected. Privacy can be improved by using pseudonyms instead of actual vehicle identities during communication. However, it is also necessary to ensure that these pseudonyms can be linked to the real vehicle identities if needed, in order to maintain accountability. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain-based decentralized pseudonym management scheme for VANET. This allows the vehicles to maintain conditional anonymity in the network. The blockchain is used to maintain a record of each vehicle and all of its pseudo-IDs. The information in the blockchain can only be accessed by authorized entities and is not available to all vehicles. The proposed distributed framework maintains an immutable record of the vehicle data, which is not vulnerable to a single point of failure. We compared the performance of the proposed approach with a traditional PKI scheme and shown that it significantly reduces the authentication delay.
The concept of interconnecting smart vehicles and advancements in automotive automation leads to beneficial outcomes, such as a reduction in road fatalities and congestion. However, including a chain of automation in the attack surface will expand the attack surface and expose the security of automobiles to malicious infiltration. The proposed methodology provides access to specific users while restricting the third party requests. Moreover, it also makes use of data exchange that takes place between the roadside units and vehicle to track the vehicle status without compromising the in-vehicle network. To ensure a valid and authentic communication, vehicles with a proper and verifiable record will only be allowed to exchange messages in the blockchain network. Using qualitative arguments, we have identified that the proposed work is resilient to identified attacks. Similarly, quantitative experimentation indicates that this methodology shows a storage size compatibility and suitable response time in realistic scenarios. Simulation results indicate that, the proposed work shows positive results to secure vehicular networks, vehicular forensics and trust management.
Muhammad Awais Khan, Saptarshi Ghosh, Sherif Adeshina Busari, Kazi Mohammed Saidul Huq · 8 authors
The new developments in mobile edge computing (MEC) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications has positioned 5G and beyond in a strong position to answer the market need towards future emerging intelligent transportation systems and smart city applications. The major attractive features of V2X communication is the inherent ability to adapt to any type of network, device, or data, and to ensure robustness, resilience and reliability of the network, which is challenging to realize. In this work, we propose to drive further these features by proposing a novel robust, resilient and reliable architecture for V2X communication based on harnessing MEC and blockchain technology. A three stage computing service is proposed. Firstly, a hierarchcial computing architecture is deployed spanning over the vehicular network that constitutes cloud computing (CC), edge computing (EC), fog computing (FC) nodes. The resources and data bases can migrate from the high capacity cloud services (furthest away from the individual node of the network) to the edge (medium) and low level fog node, according to computing service requirements. Secondly, the resource allocation filters the data according to its significance, and rank the nodes according to their usability, and selects the network technology according to their physical channel characteristics. Thirdly, we propose a blockchain-based transaction service that ensures reliability. We discussed two use cases for experimental analysis, plug-in electric vehicles in smart grid scenarios, and massive IoT data services for autonomous cars. The results show that car connectivity prediction is accurate 98% of the times, where 92% more data blocks are added using micro-blockchain solution compared to the public blockchain, where it is able to reduce the time to sign and compute the proof-of-work (PoW), and deliver a low-overhead Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This approach can be considered a strong candidate architecture for future V2X, and with more general application for everything-to-everything (X2X) communications.
The increasing prevalence and sophistication of autonomous vehicles are intricately tied with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in refining their network architectures. This technical exposition unfolds the paramount role of AI in autonomous vehicles, spotlighting its capabilities in sensor data processing, decision - making, and fostering Vehicle - to - Everything (V2X) communications. Moreover, the article elucidates the evolution and enhancement of network architectures through AI - driven technologies such as edge computing, centralized data centers, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), and 5G communications. An additional layer of exploration is provided in network security, with AI safeguarding vehicular networks through anomaly detection and ensuring secure data transmission. This interplay between AI and network architecture elevates autonomous vehicles' operational efficiency and safety and acts as a linchpin in realizing a coherent and intelligent transportation ecosystem. The comprehensive integration of AI within the network forms the foundation for autonomous vehicles to navigate within an interconnected mobility infrastructure harmoniously and securely.
Traditional identity authentication solutions mostly rely on a trusted central entity, so they cannot handle single points of failure well. In addition, most of these traditional schemes need to store a large amount of identity authentication or public key information, which makes the schemes difficult to expand and use in distributed situations. In addition, the user prefers to protect the privacy of their information during the identity verification process. Due to the open and decentralized nature of the blockchain, the existing identity verification schemes are difficult to apply well in the blockchain. To solve this problem, in this article, we propose a privacy protection identity authentication scheme based on the blockchain. The user independently generates multiple-identity information, and these identities can be used to apply for an identity certificate. Authorities use the ECDSA signature algorithm and the RSA encryption algorithm to complete the distribution of the identity certificate based on the identity information and complete the registration of identity authentication through the smart contract on the blockchain. On the one hand, it can realize the protection of real identity information; on the other hand, it can avoid the storage overhead caused by the need to store a large number of certificates or key pairs. Due to the use of the blockchain, there is no single point of failure in the authentication process, and it can be applied to distributed scenarios. The security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can meet security requirements and is feasible.
With the development of wireless communication technology and the automobile industry, the Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks bring many conveniences to humans in terms of safety and entertainment. In the process of communication between the nodes, security problems are the main concerns. Blockchain is a decentralized distributed technology used in nonsecure environments. Using blockchain technology in the VANETs can solve the security problems. However, the characteristics of highly dynamic and resource-constrained VANETs make the traditional chain blockchain system not suitable for actual VANETs scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight blockchain architecture using DAG-lattice structure for VANETs, called V-Lattice. In V-Lattice, each node (vehicle or roadside unit) has its own account chain. The transactions they generated can be added to the blockchain asynchronously and parallelly, and resource-constrained vehicles can store the pruned blockchain and execute blockchain related operations normally. At the same time, in order to encourage more nodes to participate in the blockchain, a reputation-based incentive mechanism is introduced in V-Lattice. This paper uses Colored Petri Nets to verify the security of the architecture and verifies the feasibility of PoW anti-spam through experiment. The validation results show that the architecture proposed in this paper is security, and it is feasible to prevent nodes from generating malicious behaviors by using PoW anti-spam.
Abdelwahab Boualouache, Hichem Sedjelmaci, Thomas Engel
Privacy is a key requirement for connected vehicles. Cooperation between vehicles is mandatory for achieving location privacy preservation. However, non-cooperative vehicles can be a big issue to achieve this objective. To this end, we propose a novel monetary incentive scheme for cooperative location privacy preservation in 5G-enabled Vehicular Fog Computing. This scheme leverages a consortium blockchain-enabled fog layer and smart contracts to ensure a trusted and secure cooperative Pseudonym Changing Processes (PCPs). We also propose optimized smart contracts to reduce the monetary costs of vehicles while providing more location privacy preservation. Moreover, a resilient and lightweight Utility-based Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (U-DBFT) consensus protocol is proposed to ensure fast and reliable block mining and validation. The performance analysis shows that our scheme has effective incentive techniques to stimulate non-cooperative vehicles and provides optimal monetary cost management and secure, private, fast validation of blocks.
Platooning technologies enable trucks to drive cooperatively and automatically, which bring benefits including less fuel consumption, more road capacity and safety. In order to establish trust during dynamic platoon formation, ensure vehicular data integrity, and guard platoons against potential attackers, it is pivotal to verify any given vehicle's identity information before granting it access to join a platoon. To address this concern in dynamic truck platooning, we present a novel location-aware and privacy-preserving verification protocol based on zero-knowledge proof and permissioned blockchain. By performing the verification process within the spatially-local area defined by a given platoon, our system can provide lower latency and communication overhead compared to a location-agnostic blockchain system. We prototype the proposed system and perform benchmark tests on the Hyperledger platform. The experimental results show that our system is suitable for real-world truck platooning.
Smart vehicles are expected to be equipped with high-dimensional, resource-intensive applications, including platoon control, augmented reality supported gaming, AI-based pedestrian detection, fuel scheduling, and so on, catering to diverse user preferences and enhancing safety and efficiency. These applications pose unique challenges for resource-constrained vehicles due to their intense computation requirements, whereas vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks, consisting of roadside units (RSUs) and MEC servers, contain the capability of providing cloud-like computing experience at vehicular edges while meeting performance requirements in terms of latency and throughput. Moreover, the development of intelligent VEC (IVEC) infrastructure is accelerated due to rapid advancement of AI algorithms in recent years. However, IVEC is prone to attacks, including fake computation feedback, unfair or biased resource allocation in a VEC server, and so on, due to its centralized governance and black box computation (edge computation works like a black box for end users). To combat such security vulnerabilities, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized architecture to enhance transparency in IVEC resource management and leverage edge consumers (e.g., vehicles) with a computation verification option. Additionally, we address the unbalanced load distribution issue and propose a secure IVEC federation model for balancing loads. We also outline the main challenges and provide a brief description of promising research directions to draw the attention of concerned stakeholders and parties in both the blockchain and edge computing domains.
Smart cities provide citizens with smart and advanced services to improve their quality of life. However, it has been observed that the collection, storage, processing, and analysis of heterogeneous data that are usually borne by citizens will bear certain difficulties. The development of the Internet of Things, cloud computing, social media, and other Industry 4.0 influencers pushed technology into a smart society’s framework, bringing potential vulnerabilities to sensor data, services, and smart city applications. These vulnerabilities lead to data security problems. We propose a decentralized data management system for smart and secure transportation that uses blockchain and the Internet of Things in a sustainable smart city environment to solve the data vulnerability problem. A smart transportation mobility system demands creating an interconnected transit system to ensure flexibility and efficiency. This article introduces prior knowledge and then provides a Hyperledger Fabric-based data architecture that supports a secure, trusted, smart transportation system. The simulation results show the balance between the blockchain mining time and the number of blocks created. We also use the average transaction delay evaluation model to evaluate the model and to test the proposed system’s performance. The system will address residents’ and authorities’ security challenges of the transportation system in smart, sustainable cities and lead to better governance.
Matthew Tsao, Kaidi Yang, Stephen Zoepf, Marco Pavone
The era of big data has brought with it a richer understanding of user behavior through massive datasets, which can help organizations optimize the quality of their services. In the context of transportation research, mobility data can provide municipal authorities (MAs) with insights on how to operate, regulate, or improve the transportation network. Mobility data, however, may contain sensitive information about end users and trade secrets of mobility providers (MPs). Due to this data privacy concern, MPs may be reluctant to contribute their datasets to MA. Using ideas from cryptography, we propose an interactive protocol between an MA and an MP, in which MA obtains insights from mobility data without MP having to reveal its trade secrets or sensitive data of its users. This is accomplished in two steps: 1) a commitment step and 2) a computation step. In the first step, Merkle commitments and aggregated traffic measurements are used to generate a cryptographic commitment. In the second step, MP extracts insights from the data and sends them to MA. Using the commitment and zero-knowledge proofs, MA can certify that the information received from MP is accurate, without needing to directly inspect the mobility data. We also present a differentially private version of the protocol that is suitable for the large query regime. The protocol is verifiable for both MA and MP in the sense that dishonesty from one party can be detected by the other. The protocol can be readily extended to the more general setting with multiple MPs via secure multiparty computation.
Le Xia, Yao Sun, Mohammad Rafiq Swash, Lina Mohjazi · 6 authors
Securing safe driving for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) continues to be a widespread concern, despite various sophisticated functions delivered by artificial intelligence for in-vehicle devices. Diverse malicious network attacks are ubiquitous, along with the worldwide implementation of the Internet of Vehicles, which exposes a range of reliability and privacy threats for managing data in CAV networks. Combined with the fact that the capability of existing CAVs in handling intensive computation tasks is limited, this implies a need for designing an efficient assessment system to guarantee autonomous driving safety without compromising data security. In this article we propose a novel framework, namely Blockchain-enabled intElligent Safe-driving assessmenT (BEST), which offers a smart and reliable approach for conducting safe driving supervision while protecting vehicular information. Specifically, a promising solution that exploits a long short-term memory model is introduced to assess the safety level of the moving CAVs. Then we investigate how a distributed blockchain obtains adequate trustworthiness and robustness for CAV data by adopting a byzantine fault tolerance-based delegated proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. Simulation results demonstrate that our presented BEST gains better data credibility with a higher prediction accuracy for vehicular safety assessment when compared with existing schemes. Finally, we discuss several open challenges that need to be addressed in future CAV networks.
Modern vehicles are no longer simply mechanical devices. Connectivity between the vehicular network and the outside world has widened the security holes that hackers can use to exploit a vehicular network. Controller Area Network (CAN), FlexRay, and automotive Ethernet are popular protocols for in-vehicle networks (IVNs) and will stay in the industry for many more years. However, these protocols were not designed with security in mind. They have several vulnerabilities, such as lack of message authentication, lack of message encryption, and an ID-based arbitration mechanism for contention resolution. Adversaries can use these vulnerabilities to launch sophisticated attacks that may lead to loss of life and damage to property. Thus, the security of the vehicles should be handled carefully. In this paper, we investigate the security vulnerabilities with in-vehicle network protocols such as CAN, automotive Ethernet, and FlexRay. A comprehensive survey on security attacks launched against in-vehicle networks is presented along with countermeasures adopted by various researchers. Various algorithms have been proposed in the past for intrusion detection in IVNs. However, those approaches have several limitations that need special attention from the research community. Blockchain is a good approach to solving the existing security issues in IVNs, and we suggest a way to improve IVN security based on a hybrid blockchain.
Abstract Blockchain technology has completely changed the area of cryptocurrency with a Peer-to-Peer system named Bitcoin. It can provide a distributed, transparent and highly confidential database by recording immutable transactions. Currently, the technique has obtained great research interest on other areas, including the Internet of vehicles (IoVs). In order to solve some centralized problems and improve the architecture of the IoVs, the blockchain technology is utilized to build a decentralized and secure vehicular environment. In this survey, we aim to construct a comprehensive analysis on the applications of blockchain in the IoV. This paper starts with the introduction of the IoVs and the blockchain. Additionally, some existing surveys on the blockchain enabled IoVs are reviewed. Besides, the combination of the blockchain technology and the IoVs is analyzed from seven aspects to describe how the blockchain is implemented in the IoVs. Finally, the future research directions related to the integration are highlighted.
Muhammad Firdaus, Sandi Rahmadika, Kyung-Hyune Rhee
The emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) aims to facilitate the next generation of intelligent transportation system (ITS) applications by combining smart vehicles and the internet to improve traffic safety and efficiency. On the other hand, mobile edge computing (MEC) technology provides enormous storage resources with powerful computing on the edge networks. Hence, the idea of IoV edge computing (IoVEC) networks has grown to be an assuring paradigm with various opportunities to advance massive data storage, data sharing, and computing processing close to vehicles. However, the participant's vehicle may be unwilling to share their data since the data-sharing system still relies on a centralized server approach with the potential risk of data leakage and privacy security. In addition, vehicles have difficulty evaluating the credibility of the messages they received because of untrusted environments. To address these challenges, we propose consortium blockchain and smart contracts to accomplish a decentralized trusted data sharing management system in IoVEC. This system allows vehicles to validate the credibility of messages from their neighboring by generating a reputation rating. Moreover, the incentive mechanism is utilized to trigger the vehicles to store and share their data honestly; thus, they will obtain certain rewards from the system. Simulation results substantially display an efficient network performance along with forming an appropriate incentive model to reach a decentralized trusted data sharing management of IoVEC networks.
Security Credential Management System (SCMS) provides the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) for vehicular networking. SCMS builds the state-of-the-art distributed PKI to protect the vehicular networking privacy against an honest-but-curious authority (by the use of multiple PKI authorities) and to decentralize the PKI root of trust (by the Elector-Based Root Management or EBRM, having the distributed electors manage the Root Certificate Authority or RCA). We build on the EBRM architecture and construct a Blockchain-Based Root Management (BBRM) to provide even greater decentralization and security. More specifically, BBRM uses blockchain to i) replace the existing RCA and have the electors directly involved in the root certificate generation, ii) control the elector network membership including elector addition and revocation, and iii) provide greater accountability and transparency on the aforementioned functionalities. We implement BBRM on Hyperledger Fabric using smart contract for system experimentation and analyses. Our experiments show that BBRM is lightweight in processing, efficient in ledger size, and supports a bandwidth of multiple transactions per second. Our results show that the BBRM blockchain is appropriate for the root certificate generation and the elector membership control for EBRM within SCMS, which are significantly smaller in number and occurrences than the SCMS outputs of vehicle certificates. We also experiment to analyze how the BBRM distributed consensus protocol parameters, such as the number of electors and the number of required votes, affect the overall scheme's performances.
It had been predicted that by 2020, nearly 26 billion devices would be connected to the Internet, with a big percentage being vehicles. The Internet of Vehicles (IoVa) is a concept that refers to the connection and cooperation of smart vehicles and devices in a network through the generation, transmission, and processing of data that aims at improving traffic congestion, travel time, and comfort, all the while reducing pollution and accidents. However, this transmission of sensitive data (e.g., location) needs to occur with defined security properties to safeguard vehicles and their drivers since attackers could use this data. Blockchain is a fairly recent technology that guarantees trust between nodes through cryptography mechanisms and consensus protocols in distributed, untrustful environments, like IoV networks. Much research has been done in implementing the former in the latter to impressive results, as Blockchain can cover and offer solutions to many IoV problems. However, these implementations have to deal with the challenge of IoV node’s resource constraints since they do not suffice for the computational and energy requirements of traditional Blockchain systems, which is one of the biggest limitations of Blockchain implementations in IoV. Finally, these two technologies can be used to build the foundations for smart cities, enabling new application models and better results for end-users.
Markus Lücking, Felix Kretzer, Niclas Kannengießer, Michael Beigl · 6 authors
Communication between vehicles and their environment (i.e., vehicle-to-everything or V2X communication) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has become of particular importance for smart cities. However, economic challenges, such as the cost incurred by data sharing (e.g., due to power consumption), hinder the integration of data sharing in open systems into smart city applications, such as dynamic environmental zones. Moving from open data sharing to open data trading can address the economic challenges and incentivize vehicle drivers to share their data. In this context, integrating distributed ledger technology (DLT) into open systems for data trading is promising for reducing the transaction cost of payments in data trading, avoiding dependencies on third parties, and guaranteeing openness. However, because the integration of DLT conflicts with the short available communication time between fast moving objects in VANETs, it remains unclear how open data trading in VANETs using DLT should be designed to be viable. In this work, we present a system design for data trading in VANETs using DLT. We measure the required communication time for data trading between a vehicle and a roadside unit in a real scenario and estimate the associated cost. Our results show that the proposed system design is technically feasible and economically viable.
Conglin Ran, Shuailing Yan, Huang Liang, Lei Zhang
Abstract Ad hoc network is a special network with centerless and dynamic topology. Due to the free mobility of the nodes, routing security has been a bottleneck problem that plagues its development. Therefore, a multi-path QoS (quality of service) routing security algorithm based on blockchain by improving the traditional AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector) protocol (AODV-MQS) is proposed. Firstly, a chain of nodes is established in the network and the states of all nodes by making the intermediate nodes on the chain are saved. Secondly, the smart contract in the blockchain is set to filter out the nodes that meet the QoS constraints. Finally, two largest unrelated communication paths are found in the blockchain network through smart contract, one of which is the main path and the other is the standby path. Simulation experiments show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than other algorithms, especially in an unsafe environment.
Blockchain technology continues to grow and extend into more areas with great success, which highlights the importance of studying the fields that have been, and have yet to be, fundamentally changed by its entrance. In particular, blockchain technology has been shown to be increasingly relevant in the field of transportation systems. More studies continue to be conducted relating to both fields of study and their integration. It is anticipated that their existing relationships will be greatly improved in the near future, as more research is conducted and applications are better understood. Because blockchain technology is still relatively new as compared to older, more well-used methods, many of its future capabilities are still very much unknown. However, before they can be discovered, we need to fully understand past and current developments, as well as expert observations, in applying blockchain technology to the autonomous vehicle field. From an understanding and discussion of the current and potential future capabilities of blockchain technology, as provided through this survey, advancements can be made to create solutions to problems that are inherent in autonomous vehicle systems today. The focus of this paper is mainly on the potential applications of blockchain in the future of transportation systems to be integrated with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to provide a broad overview on the current related literature and research studies in this field.