Mahsa Keshavarz, M. Gharib, Fatemeh Afghah, Jonathan Ashdown
Unmanned aerial systems (UASs) are prone to several cyber-physical attacks, which decrease the performance of the network and may cause damage to the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or their surrounding environment. In this article, we propose UASTrustChain, a trust management framework based on Blockchain time-stamped series. We consider a system of models, consists of a number of autonomous UAVs, whose behaviors are regularly monitored by a set of distributed observers (DOs). Since most cyber attacks cause interruption in the operations of UAVs or deviation from their original path, the DOs keep track of the UAVs' behavior in terms of their trajectory, as well as the number of their successful tasks. The DOs calculate a relative trust score for each UAV and keep these scores in a transparent, reliable, secure and open ledger. This framework can detect UAVs' abnormal behavior in a real-time manner further to detect the compromised distributed observers, if any. The proposed framework could also distinguish abnormal activities due to real attacks from those caused by harsh environmental conditions. We evaluate the proposed framework for its functionality and accuracy by performing extensive simulation experiments. Our simulation results show that the proposed trust model can detect compromised distributed observers and fades their effect on the UAVs trust scores. Results further show the ability of the system in detecting malicious UAVs, which can be under various cyber-physical attacks.
In view of the security risks and centralized structure of traditional intelligent transportation system, we propose a novel scheme of secure data sharing and customized services based on the consortium blockchain (DSCSCB). The ciphertext-policy attribute-based proxy re-encryption algorithm has the function of keyword searching by dividing the key into an attribute key and a search key, which not only solves the problem that proxy re-encryption algorithm cannot retrieve data, but also realizes data sharing and data forwarding. Moreover, the algorithm effectively controls the access permission of data, and provides a secure communication environment for the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). Service sectors, such as insurance companies, the traffic police and maintenance suppliers, obtain the corresponding ciphertext and then apply the smart contract to provide customized services for the onboard unit after decryption. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that our scheme not only meets the requirements of data sharing in the security and confidentiality, but also has obvious advantages in the overhead of computing and communication.
Autonomous vehicles are capable of sensing their environment and navigating without any human inputs. However, when autonomous vehicles are involved in accidents between themselves or with human subjects, liability must be indubitably decided based on accident forensics. This paper proposes a blockchain-inspired event recording system for autonomous vehicles. Specifically, we design the mechanism of “Proof-of-Event” with a dynamic federation consensus to achieve indisputable accident forensics by providing trustable and verifiable event information. We propose a dynamic federation consensus scheme to verify and confirm the new block of event data in an efficient way without any central authority. We conduct numerical analyses and prototyped experiments based on the proposed fast leader election algorithm and the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. The results show that our system is effective and feasible in generating and storing accident records in blockchain-based vehicular networks. The security capability of the proposed scheme is also discussed against multiple threats and attack scenarios.
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have several security issues such as privacy preservation, secure authentication, and system reliability. In the VANET, a vehicle communicates with other vehicles or infrastructures using broadcasting messages. These messages contain not only normal traffic information, but also identification information of sender. In general, the identification information remains encrypted to ensure privacy. However, the conventional centralized system can decrypt the identification information using private information of the sender vehicle. As a result, the central server can often be targeted by adversaries. We propose a message authentication scheme for anonymity and decentralization of information using blockchain technology. Here, we introduce public-private key and message authentication code (MAC) for secure authentication. In this paper, we adopt consensus algorithms for composing blockchain system such as the proof of work (PoW) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) into the proposed authentication process. Finally, we demonstrate that the proposed method is secure from the attacks which include impersonation from internal attacker as well as typical attacks.
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is considered as an important part of intelligent transportation system (ITS). Depending on the interconnection between vehicles and roadside units (RSUs), VANETs can provide a variety of application services for drivers and passengers. Due to the necessary service cost, many applications have to face the problem of how to charge vehicle for the services. This paper, which relies on blockchain technology, takes park toll management system and electronic toll collection system (ETC) as scenarios. Two payment schemes, V-R transaction and V-Rs transaction, are then proposed. The security and performance analysis show that the proposed schemes are efficient and robust.
Data are becoming the cornerstone of many businesses and entire systems infrastructure. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are no different. The ability of intelligent vehicles and devices to acquire and share environmental measurements in the form of data is leading to the creation of smart services for the benefit of individuals. In this paper, we present a system architecture to promote the development of ITS using distributed ledgers and related technologies. Thanks to these, it becomes possible to create, store and share data generated by users through the sensors on their devices or vehicles, while on the move. We propose an architecture based on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) to offer features such as immutability, traceability and verifiability of data. IOTA, a promising DLT for IoT, is used together with Decentralized File Storages (DFSes) to store and certify data (and their related metadata) coming from vehicles or by the users' devices themselves (smartphones). Ethereum is then exploited as the smart contract platform that coordinates the data sharing through access control mechanisms. Privacy guarantees are provided by the usage of distributed key management systems and Zero Knowledge Proof. We provide experimental results of a testbed based on real traces, in order to understand if DLT and DFS technologies are ready to support complex services, such as those that pertain to ITS. Results clearly show that, while the viability of the proposal cannot be rejected, further work is needed on the responsiveness of DLT infrastructures.
Nowadays, with rapid advancements of vehicular telematics and communication techniques, proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been witnessed, which facilitates the construction of promising intelligent transportation system (ITS). Due to inherent wireless communicating features in open environment, secure transmission among numerous VANET entities remains crucial issues. Currently, lots of research efforts have been made, while most of which tend to allocate the universal group key to the verified devices for both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-RSU (V2R) communications. However, in heterogeneous VANET environment with large numbers of devices in same vehicular group, complicated and variable topologies lead to continuous key updating in every moment, causing interference to regular V2R data exchange, which is not reliable and efficient for resource-constrained VANET environment. Moreover, group membership recording and detecting mechanisms are necessary for real time vehicle revocation and participation, which has not been further studied so far. In this paper, we address the above issues by proposing a secure authentication and key management scheme. In our design, novel VANET system model with edge computing infrastructure is adopted so as to offer adequate computing and storing capacity compared to traditional VANET structure. Note that our certificateless authentication scheme applies the independent session key for each vehicle for interference avoidance. Furthermore, consortium blockchain is employed for V2V group key construction. Real time group membership arrangement with efficient group key updating is accordingly provided. Formal security proofs are presented, demonstrating that the proposed scheme can achieve desired security properties. Performance analysis is conducted as well, proving that the proposed scheme is efficient compared with the state-of-the-arts.
Lewis Nkenyereye, Bayu Adhi Tama, Muhammad K. Shahzad, Yoon-Ho Choi
Basic safety message (BSM) are messages that contain core elements of a vehicle such as vehicle's size, position, speed, acceleration and others. BSM are lightweight messages that can be regularly broadcast by the vehicles to enable a variety of applications. On the other hand, event-driven message (EDM) are messages generated at the time of occurrence such as accidents or roads sliding and can contain much more heavy elements including pictures, audio or videos. Security, architecture and communication solutions for BSM use cases have been largely documented on in the literature contrary to EDM due to several concerns such as the variant size of EDM, the appropriate architecture along with latency, privacy and security. In this paper, we propose a secure and blockchain based EDM protocol for 5G enabled vehicular edge computing. To offer scalability and latency for the proposed scenario, we adopt a 5G cellular architecture due to its projected features compared to 4G tong-term evaluation (LTE) for vehicular communications. We consider edge computing to provide local processing of EDM that can improve the response time of public agencies (ambulances or rescue teams) that may intervene to the scene. We make use of lightweight multi-receiver signcryption scheme without pairing that offers low time consuming operations, security, privacy and access control. EDM records need to be kept into a distributed system which can guarantee reliability and auditability of EDM. To achieve this, we construct a private blockchain based on the edge nodes to store EDM records. The performance analysis of the proposed protocol confirms its efficiency.
While key negotiation schemes, such as those based on Diffie–Hellman, have been the subject of ongoing research, designing an efficient and security scheme remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel key negotiation scheme based on blockchain, which can be deployed in blockchain-enabled contexts such as data sharing or facilitating electric transactions between vehicles (e.g., unmanned vehicles). We propose three candidates for flexible selection, namely, key exchanges via transaction currency values through value channels (such as the amount in transactions), automated key exchanges through static scripts,and dynamic scripts, which can not only guarantee key availability with timeliness but also defend against MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, packet-dropping attacks, and decryption failure attacks.
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are also known as intelligent transportation systems. VANET ensures timely and accurate communications between vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) to improve road safety and enhance the efficiency of traffic flow. Due to its open wireless boundary and high mobility, VANET is vulnerable to malicious nodes that could gain access into the network and carry out serious medium access control (MAC) layer threats, such as denial of service (DoS) attacks, data modification attacks, impersonation attacks, Sybil attacks, and replay attacks. This could affect the network security and privacy, causing harm to the information exchange within the network by genuine nodes and increase fatal impacts on the road. Therefore, a novel secure trust-based architecture that utilizes blockchain technology has been proposed to increase security and privacy to mitigate the aforementioned MAC layer attacks. A series of experiment has been conducted using the Veins simulation tool to assess the performance of the proposed solution in the terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, packet loss, transmission overhead, and computational cost.
With the increasing interest in connected vehicles along with electrification opportunities, there is an ongoing effort to automate the charging process of electric vehicles (EVs) through their capabilities to communicate with the infrastructure and each other. However, charging EVs takes time and thus in-advance scheduling is needed. As this process is done frequently due to limited mileage of EVs, it may expose the locations and charging pattern of the EV to the service providers, raising privacy concerns for their users. Nevertheless, the EV still needs to be authenticated to charging providers, which means some information will need to be provided anyway. While there have been many studies to address the problem of privacy-preserving authentication for vehicular networks, such solutions will be void if charging payments are made through traditional means. In this thesis, we tackle this problem by utilizing distributed applications enabled by Blockchain and smart contracts. We adapt zero-knowledge proofs to Blockchain for enabling privacy-preserving authentication while removing the need for a central authority. We introduce two approaches, one using a token-based mechanism and another utilizing the Pederson Commitment scheme to realize anonymous authentication. We also describe a protocol for the whole process which includes scheduling and charging operations. The evaluation of the proposed approaches indicates that the overhead of this process is affordable to enable real-time charging operations for connected EVs.
This paper presents a system architecture to promote the development of smart transportation systems. Thanks to the use of distributed ledgers and related technologies, it is possible to create, store and share data generated by users through their sensors, while moving. In particular, IOTA and IPFS are used to store and certify data (and their related metadata) coming from sensors or by the users themselves. Ethereum is exploited as the smart contract platform that coordinates the data sharing and provisioning. The necessary privacy guarantees are provided by the usage of Zero Knowledge Proof. We show some results obtained from some use case scenarios that demonstrate how such technologies can be integrated to build novel smart services and to promote social good in user mobility.
Delivery service via ridesharing is a promising service to share travel costs and improve vehicle occupancy. Existing ridesharing systems require participating vehicles to periodically report individual private information (e.g., identity and location) to a central controller, which is a potential central point of failure, resulting in possible data leakage or tampering in case of controller break down or under attack. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain secured ridesharing delivery system, where the immutability and distributed architecture of the Blockchain can effectively prevent data tampering. However, such tamper-resistance property comes at the cost of a long confirmation delay caused by the consensus process. A Hash-oriented Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) based consensus algorithm is proposed to improve the Blockchain efficiency and reduce the transaction confirmation delay from 10 minutes to 15 seconds. The Hash-oriented PBFT effectively avoids the double-spending attack and Sybil attack. Security analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Blockchain secured ridesharing delivery system offers strong security guarantees and satisfies the quality of delivery service in terms of confirmation delay and transaction throughput.
Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Jiasi Weng, Ming Li · 5 authors
With the popularity of Blockchain comes grave security-related concerns. Achieving privacy and traceability simultaneously remains an open question. Efforts have been made to address the issues, while they may subject to specific scenarios. This paper studies how to provide a more general solution for this open question. Concretely, we propose Onionchain, featuring a suite of protocols, offering both traceability and privacy. As the term implies, our Onionchain is inspired by Onion routing. We investigate the principles of Onion routing carefully and integrate its mechanism together with Blockchain technology. We advocate the Blockchain community to adopt Onionchain with the regards of privacy and traceability. To this end, a case-study of Onionchain, which runs in the context of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), is proposed, providing the community a guideline to follow. Systematic security analysis and extensive experiments are also conducted to validate our secure and cost-effective Onionchain.
The security aspect of the IoT occupies a place of great importance especially after the evolution that has known this field lastly because it must take into account the transformations and the new applications .Blockchain is a new technology dedicated to the data sharing. However, this does not work the same way in the different systems with different operating principles. This article will discuss network security using the Blockchain to facilitate the sending of messages and information, enabling the use of new processes and enabling autonomous coordination of devices. To do this, we will discuss proposed solutions to ensure a high level of security in these networks in the work of other researchers. Finally, our article will propose a method of security more adapted to our needs as a team working in the ad hoc networks, this method is based on the principle of the Blockchain and that we named ”MPR Blockchain”.
In this paper, we propose an intrusion detection system (IDS) and Blockchain-based delivery framework, called DeliveryCoin, for drone-delivered services. The DeliveryCoin framework consists of four phases, including system initialization phase, creating the block, updating the blockchain, and intrusion detection phase. To achieve privacy-preservation, the DeliveryCoin framework employs hash functions and short signatures without random oracles and the Strong Diffie–Hellman (SDH) assumption in bilinear groups. To achieve consensus inside the blockchain-based delivery platform, we introduce a UAV-aided forwarding mechanism, named pBFTF. We also propose an IDS system in each macro eNB (5G) for detecting self-driving network attacks as well as false transactions between self-driving nodes. Furthermore, extensive simulations are conducted, and results confirm the efficiency of our proposed DeliveryCoin framework in terms of latency of blockchain consensus and accuracy.
Recently, connected vehicles (CV) are becoming a promising research area leading to the concept of CV as a Service (CVaaS). With the increase of connected vehicles and an exponential growth in the field of online cab booking services, new requirements such as secure, seamless and robust information exchange among vehicles of vehicular networks are emerging. In this context, the original concept of vehicular networks is being transformed into a new concept known as connected and autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicular use yields a better experience and helps in reducing congestion by allowing current information to be obtained by the vehicles instantly. However, malicious users in the internet of vehicles may mislead the whole communication where intruders may compromise smart devices with the purpose of executing a malicious ploy. In order to prevent these issues, a blockchain technique is considered the best technique that provides secrecy and protection to the control system in real time conditions. In this paper, the issue of security in smart sensors of connected vehicles that can be compromised by expert intruders is addressed by proposing a blockchain framework. This study has further identified and validated the proposed mechanism based on various security criteria, such as fake requests of the user, compromise of smart devices, probabilistic authentication scenarios and alteration in stored user's ratings. The results have been analyzed against some existing approach and validated with improved simulated results that offer 79% success rate over the above-mentioned issues.
Myeonghyun Kim, Kisung Park, Sungjin Yu, Joonyoung Lee · 7 authors
Smart grids incorporating internet-of-things are emerging solutions to provide a reliable, sustainable and efficient electricity supply, and electric vehicle drivers can access efficient charging services in the smart grid. However, traditional electric vehicle charging systems are vulnerable to distributed denial of service and privileged insider attacks when the central charging server is attacked. The blockchain-based charging systems have been proposed to resolve these problems. In 2018, Huang et al. proposed the electric vehicle charging system using lightning network and smart contract. However, their system has an inefficient charging mechanism and does not guarantee security of key. We propose a secure charging system for electric vehicles based on blockchain to resolve these security flaws. Our charging system ensures the security of key, secure mutual authentication, anonymity, and perfect forward secrecy, and also provides efficient charging. We demonstrate that our proposed system provides secure mutual authentication using Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic and prevents replay and man-in-the-middle attacks using automated validation of internet security protocols and applications simulation tool. Furthermore, we compare computation and communication costs with previous schemes. Therefore, the proposed charging system efficiently applies to practical charging systems for electric vehicles.
Farhan Ahmad, Chaker Abdelaziz Kerrache, Fatih Kurugöllü, Rasheed Hussain
The revolution of Internet-of-vehicles (IoV) has stimulated a substantial response from academia, research, and industry due to its massive potential to improve overall transportation. Current IoV faces huge challenges due to its reliance on IP-based network architecture. Therefore, named data networking (NDN) is proposed as a promising architecture to solve issues posed by IP-based systems. Recently, blockchains (BCs) have been utilized within IoV to increase network security. However, the integration of BC within NDN-enabled IoV is still an open research problem. In this study, we proposed a novel tier-based architecture known as “Blockchain in NDN-enabled Internet-of-vehicles (BINDN),” which can support BC within NDN-enabled IoV. BINDN can be used as reference architecture to design security solutions in NDN-enabled IoV using BC. Furthermore, it provides an extensive set of applications including IoV security, trust management, and privacy enhancements. Moreover, we highlighted major challenges and issues when integrating BC within NDN-enabled IoV.
Ever-growing incorporation of connected vehicle (CV) technologies into intelligent traffic signal control systems brings about significant data security issues in the connected vehicular networks. This paper presents a novel decentralized and secure by design architecture for connected vehicle data security, which is based on the emerging blockchain paradigm. In a simulation study, we applied this architecture to defend the Intelligent Traffic Signal System (I-SIG), a USDOT approved CV pilot program, against congestion attacks. The results show the performance of the proposed architecture for the traffic signal control system.
Roman Overko, Rodrigo Ordóñez-Hurtado, Sergiy Zhuk, Pietro Ferraro · 6 authors
We introduce a permissioned distributed ledger technology (DLT) design for crowdsourced smart mobility applications. This architecture is based on a directed acyclic graph architecture (similar to the IOTA tangle) and uses both Proof-of-Work and Proof-of-Position mechanisms to provide protection against spam attacks and malevolent actors. In addition to enabling individuals to retain ownership of their data and to monetize it, the architecture also is suitable for distributed privacy-preserving machine learning algorithms, is lightweight, and can be implemented in simple internet-of-things (IoT) devices. To demonstrate its efficacy, we apply this framework to reinforcement learning settings where a third party is interested in acquiring information from agents. In particular, one may be interested in sampling an unknown vehicular traffic flow in a city, using a DLT-type architecture and without perturbing the density, with the idea of realizing a set of virtual tokens as surrogates of real vehicles to explore geographical areas of interest. These tokens, whose authenticated position determines write access to the ledger, are thus used to emulate the probing actions of commanded (real) vehicles on a given planned route by "jumping" from a passing-by vehicle to another to complete the planned trajectory. Consequently, the environment stays unaffected (i.e., the autonomy of participating vehicles is not influenced by the algorithm), regardless of the number of emitted tokens. The design of such a DLT architecture is presented, and numerical results from large-scale simulations are provided to validate the proposed approach.
As Electric Vehicles (EVs) are becoming widely available, their secure management is crucial to fully enable their potential. For instance, for convenient charging, they may require quick authentication with the charging stations while they are on the go. As charging is frequently needed, exposing one's charging frequency to the stations may risk the exposure of privacy for the EV driver. Therefore, a mechanism is needed to hide EV information. In this paper, we propose using zero-knowledge proofs to achieve this goal. While zero-knowledge proofs can provide anonymous authentication, they require computation for generation of witnesses. Therefore, we assess the overhead of generating a witness and proof computation at the resource constrained on-board units (OBUs) which are deployed on EVs that utilize wireless communications for scheduling. The results indicate that computation overhead is minimal and can be delployed on resource contrained devices.
Rakesh Shrestha, Rojeena Bajracharya, Anish Prasad Shrestha, Seung Yeob Nam
In the Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET), the collection and dissemination of life-threatening traffic event information by vehicles are of utmost importance. However, traditional VANETs face several security issues. We propose a new type of blockchain to resolve critical message dissemination issues in the VANET. We create a local blockchain for real-world event message exchange among vehicles within the boundary of a country, which is a new type of blockchain suitable for the VANET. We present a public blockchain that stores the node trustworthiness and message trustworthiness in a distributed ledger that is appropriate for secure message dissemination.