Ayesha Sadiq, Muhammad Umar Javed, Rabiya Khalid, Ahmad Almogren · 6 authors
The drastic increase in real-time vehicle generated data of various types has imparted a great concept of data trading in vehicular networks. Whereas immense usage of Electric Vehicles (EVs) as mobile energy carriers have supported distributed energy trading due to their bidirectional charging and discharging capabilities. The trustless environment of Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEV), including fuel vehicles and EVs, encounters trading disputes and conflicting interests among trading parties. To address these challenges, we exploit consortium blockchain to maintain transparency and trust in trading activities. Smart contracts are used to tackle trading disputes and illegal actions. Data duplication problem occurs when a dishonest user sell previously traded data multiple times for financial gain. Therefore, data duplication validation is done through previously stored hash-list at roadside units (RSUs) employed with bloom filters for efficient data lookup. Removing data duplication at an earlier stage reduces storage cost. Moreover, an elliptic curve bilinear pairing based digital signature scheme is used to ensure the reliability and integrity of traded data. To ensure persistent availability of traded data, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is used, which provides fault-tolerant and a reliable data storage without any single point of failure. On the other hand, the energy trading transactions among EVs face some security and privacy protection challenges. An adversary can infer the energy trading records of EVs, and launch the data linkage attacks. To address this issue, an account generation technique is used that hides the energy trading trends. The new account generation for an EV depends upon its traded volume of energy. The experimental results verify the efficiency of the proposed data and energy trading scheme in IoEV with the reliable and secure data storage.
Isaac Agudo, Manuel Montenegro-Gomez, Javier López
New mobility paradigms have appeared in recent years, and everything suggests that some more are coming. This fact makes apparent the necessity of modernizing the road infrastructure, the signalling elements and the traffic management systems. Many initiatives have emerged around the term Intelligent Transport System (ITS) in order to define new scenarios and requirements for this kind of applications. We even have two main competing technologies for implementing Vehicular communication protocols (V2X), C-V2X and 802.11p, but neither of them is widely deployed yet. One of the main barriers for the massive adoption of those technologies is governance. Current solutions rely on the use of a public key infrastructure that enables secure collaboration between the different entities in the V2X ecosystem, but given its global scope, managing such infrastructure requires reaching agreements between many parties, with conflicts of interest between automakers and telecommunication operators. As a result, there are plenty of use cases available and two mature communication technologies, but the complexity at the business layer is stopping the drivers from taking advantage of ITS applications. Blockchain technologies are defining a new decentralized paradigm for most traditional applications, where smart contracts provide a straightforward mechanism for decentralized governance. In this work, we propose an approach for decentralized V2X (D-V2X) that does not require any trusted authority and can be implemented on top of any communication protocol. We also define a proof-of-concept technical architecture on top of a cheap and highly secure System-on-Chip (SoC) that could allow for massive adoption of D-V2X.
As the commercial use of 5G technologies has grown more prevalent, smart vehicles have become an efficient platform for delivering a wide array of services directly to customers. The vehicular crowdsourcing service (VCS), for example, can provide immediate and timely feedback to the user regarding real-time transportation information. However, different sources can generate spurious information towards a specific service request in the pursuit of profit. Distinguishing trusted information from numerous sources is the key to a reliable VCS platform. This paper proposes a solution to this problem called "RC-chain", a reputation-based crowdsourcing framework built on a blockchain platform (Hyperledger Fabric). We first establish the blockchain-based platform to support the management of crowdsourcing trading and user-reputation evaluating activities. A reputation model, the Trust Propagation \& Feedback Similarity (TPFS), then calculates the reputation values of participants and reveals any malicious behavior accordingly. Finally, queueing theory is used to evaluate the blockchain-based platform and optimize the system performance. The proposed framework was deployed on the IBM Hyperledger Fabric platform to observe its real-world running time, effectiveness, and overall performance.
Nathan Martindale, Scott Stewart, Mark Adams, Greg Westphal
In international nuclear safeguards, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is tasked with inspecting and verifying nuclear facilities and their activities. Data analytics and machine learning to support inspections require large amounts of data that nuclear facility operators may consider proprietary or sensitive, so the IAEA may not have full access. Allowing computation over private data without compromising its security therefore has value for safeguards inspections and analysis. Privacy-preserving machine learning (PPML) consists of security-focused techniques that allow data analytics and machine learning algorithms to run on sensitive data without revealing it. This includes ideas like homomorphic encryption (HE), secure multiparty computation (SMPC), and secure enclaves. HE allows algorithms and mathematical operations to be conducted directly on the encrypted data instead of first decrypting it. With SMPC, multiple entities collaboratively compute over distributed data such that no party is able to directly view any others’ original data. Secure enclaves allow computation to take place in a separate and heavily blocked-off section of a CPU. Techniques like these allow for several potential use cases in which the security of data is essential. With SMPC, machine learning models can be trained over the input data from multiple entities, resulting in a model that all users can benefit from without leaking the input data from any particular entity. With SMPC or a zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), an algorithm returning some single answer or truth value can be run on someone else’s data without ever needing to see that data, potentially allowing for verification or proof of some underlying question. HE can allow for outsourcing computation on data to a hostile or untrusted environment. Although most of the research in this field resides within the health and financial domains, tools from PPML may have similar applications in nuclear safeguards. Allowing the IAEA to compute over proprietary information, such as process models and raw sensor data using PPML techniques, provides the baseline for running complex analytics without needing direct unencrypted access to the underlying data, maintaining its privacy. Important limitations to consider for these techniques include the efficiency and level of security required. The security of HE and SMPC come at the cost of speed—the significant amount of overhead means that algorithms implemented in these protocols and encryption schemes are slower than when run on plaintext. Additionally, several important parameters determine what techniques or protocols are used based on the security requirements. SMPC protocols may need to be selected for resistance against a party that attempts to deviate from the protocol to distort the result or gain access to additional information, and a protocol secure against these attacks may further increase the overhead of the algorithm.
Andrea Tesei, Domenico Lattuca, Marco Luise, Paolo Pagano · 6 authors
The widespread adoption of Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) applications requires the implementation of stringent security mechanisms to minimize the surface of cyber attacks. Authentication is an effective process for validating user identity in vehicular networks. However, authentication alone is not enough to prevent dangerous attack situations. Existing security mechanisms are not able to promptly revoke the credentials of misbehaving vehicles, thus tolerate malicious actors to remain trusted in the system for a long time. The resulting vulnerability window allows the implementation of complex attacks, thus posing a substantial impairment to the security of the vehicular ecosystem. In this paper we propose a Distributed Ledger-based Vehicular Revocation Scheme that improves the state of the art by providing a \textit{vulnerability window} lower than 1 second, reducing well-behaved vehicles exposure to sophisticated and potentially dangerous attacks. The proposed scheme harnesses the advantages of the underlying Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to implement a privacy-aware revocation process while being fully transparent to all participating entities. Furthermore, it meets the critical message processing times defined by EU and US standards, thus closing a critical gap in the current international standards. Theoretical analysis and experimental validation demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme, where DLT streamlines the revocation operation overhead and delivers an economically viable yet scalable solution against cyber attacks on vehicular systems.
Currently, the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has caused catastrophic effect on every aspect of our lives, globally. The entire human race of all countries and regions has suffered devastating losses. With its high infectiousness and mortality rate, it is of great significance to carry out effective precautions and prevention of COVID-19. Specifically, the transportation system has been confirmed as one of the crucial spreading routes. Hence, enhancing healthcare monitoring and infection tracking for high-mobility transportation system is infeasible for pandemic control. Meanwhile, due to the promising advantages in the emerging intelligent transportation system (ITS), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is able to collect and process relevant vehicular data for improving the driving experience and road safety, which provide a way for non-contact automatic healthcare monitoring. Furthermore, the proliferating cloud computing and blockchain techniques enable sufficient processing and storing capabilities, along with decentralized remote auditing towards heterogenous vehicular data. In this case, the automated infection tracking for pandemic control could be achieved accordingly. For the above consideration, in this paper we develop a practical homomorphic authentication scheme for cloud-assisted VANETs, where the healthcare monitoring for all involving passengers is provided. Notably, the integrated cloud-assisted VANET infrastructure is utilized, where the hybrid medical data acquisition module is attached. In this way, timely, non-contact measurement on all passengers’ physical status can be remotely done by vehicular cloud (VC), which could also drastically improve the efficiency and guarantee safety. Vulnerabilities of the employed dedicated-short-range-communication (DSRC) technique could be properly addressed with the applied homomorphic encryption design. Additionally, the decentralized blockchain-based vehicle recording mechanism is cooperatively performed by VC and edge units. Infection tracking on specific vehicle and individual can be offered in this way. Each signature sequence is collaboratively maintained and verified by the current roadside unit (RSU) and its neighbor RSUs. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is secure against major attacks, while the performance comparison with the state-of-the-arts relevant methods are presented for efficiency discussion.
Blockchain is an emerging technology that has shaken the financial sector, and which is already perceived as having an impact. A blockchain is a network of many interconnected nodes, both trustworthy and malicious, which can reach a consensus and generate valid data. The resulting information is packed into a block and permanently saved on the network in a tamper-proof way. In this paper, we propose an adaptation of blockchain for securely storing data in a vehicular-based network. Our approach can work for storing data such as traffic events and user reputation. The proposed solution has two interconnected components: the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) blockchain and the reputation system. The paper presents synthetic tests which validate the use cases of the solution: users reporting speeds and alerts behind which we see a fair reputation system penalising the (wrong/false) users.
Blockchain applications in vehicular networks can offer many advantages, including decentralization and improved security. However, most of the consensus algorithms in blockchain are difficult to be implemented in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) without the help of edge computing services. For example, the connectivity in VANET only remains for a short period of time, which is not sufficient for highly time-consuming consensus algorithms, e.g., Proof of Work, running on mobile-edge nodes (vehicles). Other consensus algorithms also have some drawbacks, e.g., Proof of Stake (PoS) is biased toward nodes with a higher amount of stakes and Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) is not highly secure against malicious nodes. For these reasons, we propose a voting blockchain based on the Proof-of-Quality-Factor (PoQF) consensus algorithm, where the threshold number of votes is controlled by edge computing servers. Specifically, PoQF includes voting for message validation and a competitive relay selection process based on the probabilistic prediction of channel quality between the transmitter and receiver. The performance bounds of failure and latency in message validation are obtained. This article also analyzes the throughput of block generation, as well as the asymptotic latency, security, and communication complexity of PoQF. An incentive distribution mechanism to reward honest nodes and punish malicious nodes is further presented and its effectiveness against the collusion of nodes is proved using the game theory. Simulation results show that PoQF reduces failure in validation by 11% and 15% as compared to PoS and PoET, respectively, and is 68 ms faster than PoET.
Autonomous vehicle platoon is a promising paradigm towards traffic congestion problems in the intelligent transportation system. However, under certain circumstances, the advantage of the platoon cannot be fully developed. In this paper, we focus on the highway Electronic Toll Collection (ETC) charging problem. We try to let the opportunistic platoon pass the ETC as a whole. There are three main issues in this scenario. Firstly, the opportunistic platoon is temporarily composed; vehicles do not trust each other. Secondly, single vehicle may try to escape from the ETC charging by following the platoon. Finally, platoon members may collude with each other and try to underreport the number of vehicles in the platoon so as to evade payment. To solve these challenges, we propose a blockchain-based efficient highway toll paradigm for the opportunistic platoon. The driving history, credential information of every registered vehicle, is recorded and verified from the blockchain. A roadside unit (RSU) is adopted to distinguish the single vehicle from the platoon and in charge of lane allocation. Additionally, an aggregate signature is introduced to accelerate the authentication procedure in the RSU. We analyse the potential security threats in this scenario. The experimental result indicates that our scheme is efficient and practical.
Ahmed Didouh, Anthony Bahadir Lopez, Yassin El Hillali, Atika Rivenq · 5 authors
Cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS) applications are generally susceptible to position spoofing-dependent attacks such as Sybil and DDoS attacks due to a lack of established solutions. This paper presents a novel cyber-physical blockchain cryptographic architecture to help prevent position spoofing attackers from becoming validated nodes in C-ITS applications. The solution also guarantees security requirements including the non-trivial non-repudiation in light of these and other attacks. With a use case of electronic toll collection (ETC), our architecture implements techniques based on Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI) measurements in conjunction with blockchain authentication methods such as Proof-of-Location and smart contracts to determine the legitimacy of a node. We demonstrate our solution in experiments using ITS-G5 Cohda Wireless technology (a Road Side Unit and two On-Board Units programmed with the ITS Vanetza stack) with functionalities specified by the European Telecommunications Standardization Institute (ETSI). From our experimental results from several driving-based data gathering tests, we discovered that our solution is able to cope with noise and relative velocity challenges because it incorporates both OBUs and RSUs in the Proof of Location computation steps. In light of this, the proposed architecture may also be applicable to govern V2X in general.
Gianmarco Baldini, José L. Hernández-Ramos, Gary Steri, Ricardo Neisse · 5 authors
In recent years, distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) and blockchain have become disruptive technologies to support distributed and trusted sharing ecosystems in various domains. Among the potential scenarios that can leverage their benefits, cooperative intelligent transport systems (C-ITS) and autonomous vehicles (AV) represent a key trend of the next digital era to build a safer society. However, different aspects such as performance and practical issues, as well as conformance with current standards and legislation, may hinder the adoption of DLT in such scenarios. This article analyses the potential applications that could leverage DLTs features and the challenges to be overcome in the coming years to foster the adoption of DLTs in C-ITS and AV. Through this analysis, we additionally provide a set of potential research directions and ways forward to exploit the advantages of DLTs in C-ITS and AV in terms of decentralized trust and transparency.
With the development of wireless local area networks and intelligent transportation technologies, the Internet of Vehicles is considered to be an effective method to alleviate the severe situation of the current transportation system. The vehicles in the Internet of Vehicles system build the Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks through wireless communication technology and dynamically provide different services through the real-time driving information broadcast by the vehicles. Vehicle drivers can control the distance, planning the driving route, between vehicles according to the current traffic environment, which improves the overall safety and efficiency of the traffic system. Due to the particularity of the Internet of Vehicles system service, vehicles need to broadcast their location information frequently. Attackers can collect and analyze vehicle broadcast information to steal privacy and even directionally track the owner through the driving trajectory, bringing serious security risks. This paper proposes a blockchain-based privacy protection system for the Internet of Vehicles. The system combines the blockchain with the Internet of Vehicles system to design a safe and efficient two-way authentication and key agreement algorithm through encryption and signature algorithm, which also solves the central dependency problem of the traditional Internet of Vehicles system.
The vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) comprises enabling technologies for a large number of important applications including collaborative autonomous driving and advanced transportation systems. Due to the mobility of vehicles, strict application requirements, and limited communication resources, the conventional centralized control fails to provide sufficient quality of service for connected vehicles, so a decentralized approach is required in the vicinity to satisfy the requirements of delay-sensitive and mission-critical applications. A decentralized system is also more resistant to the single point of failure problem and malicious attacks. Blockchain technology has been attracting great interest due to its capability of achieving a decentralized, transparent, and tamper-resistant system. There are many studies focusing on the use of blockchain in managing data and transactions in vehicular environments. However, the application of blockchain in vehicular environments also faces some technical challenges. In this paper, we first explain the fundamentals of blockchain and vehicular IoT. Then, we conduct a literature review on the existing research efforts of the blockchain for vehicular IoT by discussing the research problems and technical issues. After that, we point out some future research issues considering the characteristics of both blockchain and vehicular IoT.
Yulei Wu, Hong‐Ning Dai, Hao Wang, Kim‐Kwang Raymond Choo
5G-enabled drones have potential applications in a variety of both military and civilian settings (e.g., monitoring and tracking of individuals in demonstrations and/or enforcing of social / physical distancing during pandemics such as COVID-19). Such applications generally involve the collection and dissemination of (massive) data from the drones to remote data centres for storage and analysis, for example via 5G networks. Consequently, there are security and privacy considerations underpinning 5G-enabled drone communications. We posit the potential of leveraging blockchain to facilitate privacy preservation, and therefore in this article we will review existing blockchain-based solutions after introducing the architecture for 5G-enabled drone communications and blockchain. We will also review existing legislation and data privacy regulations that need to be considered in the design of blockchain-based solutions, as well as identifying potential challenges and open issues which will hopefully inform future research agenda.
The aim of this paper is to understand whether Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) are ready to support complex services, such as those related to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In smart transportation services, a huge amount of sensed data is generated by a multitude of vehicles. While DLTs provide very interesting features, such as immutability, traceability and verifiability of data, some doubts on the scalability and responsiveness of these technologies appear to be well-founded. We propose an architecture for ITS that resorts to DLT features. Moreover, we provide experimental results of a real test-bed over IOTA, a promising DLT for IoT. Results clearly show that, while the viability of the proposal cannot be rejected, further work is needed on the responsiveness of DLT infrastructures.
Owing to the advancement of wireless communication technologies, drivers can rely on smart connected vehicles to communicate with each other, roadside units, pedestrians, and remote service providers to enjoy a large amount of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services, including navigation, parking, ride hailing, and car sharing. These V2X services provide different functions for bettering travel experiences, which have a bunch of benefits. In the real world, even without smart connected vehicles, drivers as users can utilize their smartphones and mobile applications to access V2X services and connect their smartphones to vehicles through some interfaces, e.g., IOS Carplay and Android Auto. In this way, they can still enjoy V2X services through modern car infotainment systems installed on vehicles. \n \nMost of the V2X services are data-centric and data-intensive, i.e., users have to upload personal data to a remote service provider, and the service provider can continuously collect a user's data and offer personalized services. However, the data acquired from users may include users' sensitive information, which may expose user privacy and cause serious consequences. To protect user privacy, a basic privacy-preserving mechanism, i.e, anonymization, can be applied in V2X services. Nevertheless, a big obstacle arises as well: user anonymization may affect V2X services' availability. As users become anonymous, users may behave selfishly and maliciously to break the functions of a V2X service without being detected and the service may become unavailable. In short, there exist a conflict between privacy and availability, which is caused by different requirements of users and service providers. In this thesis, we have identified three major conflicts between privacy and availability for V2X services: privacy vs. linkability, privacy vs. accountability, privacy vs. reliability, and then have proposed and designed three privacy-preserving mechanisms to resolve these conflicts. \n \nFirstly, the thesis investigates the conflict between privacy and linkability in an automated valet parking (AVP) service, where users can reserve a parking slot for their vehicles such that vehicles can achieve automated valet parking. As an optional privacy-preserving measure, users can choose to anonymize their identities when booking a parking slot for their vehicles. In this way, although user privacy is protected by anonymization, malicious users can repeatedly send parking reservation requests to a parking service provider to make the system unavailable (i.e., "Double-Reservation Attack"). Aiming at this conflict, a security model is given in the thesis to clearly define necessary privacy requirements and potential attacks in an AVP system, and then a privacy-preserving reservation scheme has been proposed based on BBS+ signature and zero-knowledge proof. In the proposed scheme, users can keep anonymous since users only utilize a one-time unlinkable token generated from his/her anonymous credential to achieve parking reservations. In the meantime, by utilizing proxy re-signature, the scheme can also guarantee that one user can only have one token at a time to resist against "Double-Reservation Attack". \n \nSecondly, the thesis investigates the conflict between privacy and accountability in a car sharing service, where users can conveniently rent a shared car without human intervention. One basic demand for car sharing service is to check the user's identity to determine his/her validity and enable the user to be accountable if he/she did improper behavior. If the service provider allows users to hide their identities and achieve anonymization to protect user privacy, naturally the car sharing service is unavailable. Aiming at this conflict, a decentralized, privacy-preserving, and accountable car sharing architecture has been proposed in the thesis, where multiple dynamic validation servers are employed to build decentralized trust for users. Under this architecture, the thesis proposes a privacy-preserving identity management scheme to assist in managing users' identities in a dynamic manner based on a verifiable secret sharing/redistribution technique, i.e. the validation servers who manage users' identities are dynamically changed with the time advancing. Moreover, the scheme enables a majority of dynamic validation servers to recover the misbehaving users' identities and guarantees that honest users' identities are confidential to achieve privacy preservation and accountability at the same time. \n \nThirdly, the thesis investigates the conflict between privacy and reliability in a road condition monitoring service, where users can report road conditions to a monitoring service provider to help construct a live map based on crowdsourcing. Usually, a reputation-based mechanism is applied in the service to measure a user's reliability. However, this mechanism cannot be easily integrated with a privacy-preserving mechanism based on user anonymization. When users are anonymous, they can upload arbitrary reports to destroy the service quality and make the service unavailable. Aiming at this conflict, a privacy-preserving crowdsourcing-based road condition monitoring scheme has been proposed in the thesis. By leveraging homomorphic commitments and PS signature, the scheme supports anonymous user reputation management without the assistance of any third-party authority. Furthermore, the thesis proposes several zero-knowledge proof protocols to ensure that a user can keep anonymous and unlinkable but a monitoring service provider can still judge the reliability of this user's report through his/her reputation score. \n \nTo sum up, with more attention being paid to privacy issues, how to protect user privacy for V2X services becomes more significant. The thesis proposes three effective privacy-preserving mechanisms for V2X services, which resolve the conflict between privacy and availability and can be conveniently integrated into current V2X applications since no trusted third party authority is required. The proposed approaches should be valuable for achieving practical privacy preservation in V2X services.
In recent times, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) have become a core part of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), which aim to achieve continual Internet connectivity among vehicles on the road. The VANET has been used to improve driving safety and construct an ITS in modern cities. However, owing to the wireless characteristics, the message transmitted through the network can be observed, altered, or forged. Since driving safety is a major part of VANET, the security and privacy of these messages must be preserved. Therefore, this paper introduces an efficient privacy-preserving data transmission architecture that makes use of blockchain technology in cluster-based VANET. The cluster-based VANET architecture is used to achieve load balancing and minimize overhead in the network, where the clustering process is performed using the rainfall optimization algorithm (ROA). The ROA-based clustering with blockchain-based data transmission, called a ROAC-B technique, initially clusters the vehicles, and communication takes place via blockchain technology. A sequence of experiments was conducted to ensure the superiority of the ROAC-B technique, and several aspects of the results were considered. The simulation outcome showed that the ROAC-B technique is superior to other techniques in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), end to end (ETE) delay, throughput, and cluster size.
Rakesh Shrestha, Seung Yeob Nam, Rojeena Bajracharya, Shiho Kim
With the rapid evolution in wireless communications and autonomous vehicles, intelligent and autonomous vehicles will be launched soon. Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communications provides driving safety, traffic efficiency, and road information in real-time in vehicular networks. V2X has evolved by integrating cellular 5G and New Radio (NR) access technology in V2X communications (i.e., 5G NR V2X); it can fulfill the ever-evolving vehicular application, communication, and service demands of connected vehicles, such as ultra-low latency, ultra-high bandwidth, ultra-high reliability, and security. However, with the increasing number of intelligent and autonomous vehicles and their safety requirements, there is a backlash in deployment and management because of scalability, poor security and less flexibility. Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) plays a significant role in bringing cloud services closer to vehicular nodes, which reduces the scalability and flexibility issues. In addition, blockchain has evolved as an effective technology enabler to solve several security, privacy, and networking issues faced by the current 5G-based MEC systems in vehicular networks. Blockchain can be integrated as a strong security mechanism for securing and managing 5G V2X along with MEC. In this survey, we discuss, in detail, state-of-the-art V2X, its evolution based on cellular 5G technology and non-cellular 802.11bd. We investigate the integration of blockchain in 5G-based MEC vehicular networks for security, privacy protection, and content caching. We present the issues and challenges in existing edge computing and 5G V2X and, then, we shed some light on future research directions in these integrated and emerging technologies.
The dissemination of false messages in Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has a negative impact on road safety and traffic efficiency. Therefore, it is critical to quickly detect fake news considering news timeliness in IoV. We propose a network computing framework Quick Fake News Detection (QcFND) in this paper, which exploits the technologies from Software-Defined Networking (SDN), edge computing, blockchain, and Bayesian networks. QcFND consists of two tiers: edge and vehicles. The edge is composed of Software-Defined Road Side Units (SDRSUs), which is extended from traditional Road Side Units (RSUs) and hosts virtual machines such as SDN controllers and blockchain servers. The SDN controllers help to implement the load balancing on IoV. The blockchain servers accommodate the reports submitted by vehicles and calculate the probability of the presence of a traffic event, providing time-sensitive services to the passing vehicles. Specifically, we exploit Bayesian Network to infer whether to trust the received traffic reports. We test the performance of QcFND with three platforms, i.e., Veins, Hyperledger Fabric, and Netica. Extensive simulations and experiments show that QcFND achieves good performance compared with other solutions.
Driverless parking, an influential application of Mobility as a Service (MaaS) model, is one of the clear early benefits for autonomous vehicles, given often narrow spaces and multiple potential hazards (such as pedestrians stepping out from in between other vehicles). In recent years, real momentum has been building up for designing automated parking models for vehicles. However, in such an autonomous parking design, location privacy and identity privacy issues are always overlapping due to the improper sharing of data. Most existing studies barely investigate and poorly address such privacy issues. Motivated by this, we develop (and evaluate) an experience-driven, secure and privacy-aware framework of parking reservations for automated cars. Our idea of using differential privacy with zero-knowledge proof provides both security and privacy guarantees to users. Furthermore, the performance of the developed model is enhanced by exploiting reinforcement learning approach such that the utility of the system and the parking reservation rate can be maximized. Extensive evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the proposed model.
The concept of smart cities has become prominent in modern metropolises due to the emergence of embedded and connected smart devices, systems, and technologies. They have enabled the connection of every "thing" to the Internet. Therefore, in the upcoming era of the Internet of Things, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) will play a crucial role in newly developed smart cities. The IoV has the potential to solve various traffic and road safety problems effectively in order to prevent fatal crashes. However, a particular challenge in the IoV, especially in Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications, is to ensure fast, secure transmission and accurate recording of the data. In order to overcome these challenges, this work is adapting Blockchain technology for real time application (RTA) to solve Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications problems. Therefore, the main novelty of this paper is to develop a Blockchain-based IoT system in order to establish secure communication and create an entirely decentralized cloud computing platform. Moreover, the authors qualitatively tested the performance and resilience of the proposed system against common security attacks. Computational tests showed that the proposed solution solved the main challenges of Vehicle-to-X (V2X) communications such as security, centralization, and lack of privacy. In addition, it guaranteed an easy data exchange between different actors of intelligent transportation systems.
One of the biggest challenges associated with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is to maintain and make use of vehicles health records (VHR). VHR can facilitate different entities to offer various services in a proactive, transparent, secure, reliable and in an efficient manner. The state-of-the-art solutions for maintaining the VHR are centralized in nature, mainly owned by manufacturer and authorized in-vehicle device developers. Owners, drivers, and other key service providers have limited accessibility and control to the VHR. We need to change the strategy from single or limited party access to multi-party access to VHR in an secured manner so that all stakeholders of intelligent transportation system (ITS) can be benefited from this. Any unauthorized attempt to alter the data should also be prevented. Blockchain is one such potential candidate, which can facilitate the sharing of such data among different participating organizations and individuals. For example, owners, manufacturers, trusted third parties, road authorities, insurance companies, charging stations, and car selling ventures can access VHR stored on the blockchain in a permissioned, secured, and with a higher level of confidence. In this paper, a blockchain-based decentralized secure system for V-CARE is proposed to manage records in an interoperable framework that leads to improved ITS services in terms of safety, availability, reliability, efficiency, and maintenance. Insurance based on pay-how-you-drive (PHYD), and sale and purchase of used vehicles can also be made more transparent and reliable without compromising the confidentiality and security of sensitive data.
Muhammad Baqer Mollah, Jun Zhao, Dusit Niyato, Yong Liang Guan · 8 authors
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an emerging concept that is believed to help realize the vision of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs). IoV has become an important research area of impactful applications in recent years due to the rapid advancements in vehicular technologies, high throughput satellite communication, the Internet of Things, and cyber-physical systems. IoV enables the integration of smart vehicles with the Internet and system components attributing to their environments, such as public infrastructures, sensors, computing nodes, pedestrians, and other vehicles. By allowing the development of a common information exchange platform between vehicles and heterogeneous vehicular networks, this integration aims to create a better environment and public space for the people as well as to enhance safety for all road users. Being a participatory data exchange and storage, the underlying information exchange platform of IoV needs to be secure, transparent, and immutable in order to achieve the intended objectives of ITS. In this connection, the adoption of blockchain as a system platform for supporting the information exchange needs of IoV has been explored. Due to their decentralized and immutable nature, IoV applications enabled by blockchain are believed to have a number of desirable properties, such as decentralization, security, transparency, immutability, and automation. In this article, we present a contemporary survey on the latest advancement in blockchain for IoV. Particularly, we highlight the different application scenarios of IoV after carefully reviewing the recent literature. We also investigate several key challenges where blockchain is applied in IoV. Furthermore, we present the future opportunities and explore further research directions of IoV as a key enabler of ITS.