This paper deals with the design of the secure network in an Enhanced Internet of Vehicles by using the Blockchain Governance Game (BGG). The BGG is a system model of a stochastic game to find best strategies towards preparation of preventing a network malfunction by an attacker and the paper applies this game model into the connected vehicle security. Analytically tractable results for decision-making parameters enable to predict the moment for safety operations and to deliver the optimal combination of the number of reserved nodes with the acceptance probability of backup nodes to protect a connected car. This research helps for whom considers the enhanced secure IoV architecture with the BGG within a decentralized network.
Assisting traffic control is one of the most important applications on the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs). Traffic information provided by vehicles is desired since drivers or vehicle sensors are sensitive in perceiving or detecting nuances on roads. However, the availability and privacy preservation of this information are critical while conflicted with each other in the vehicular communication. In this paper, we propose a semicentralized mode with attribute-based blockchain in IoVs to balance the tradeoff between the availability and the privacy preservation. In this mode, a method of control-by-vehicles is used to control signals of traffic lights to increase traffic efficiency. Users are grouped their attributes such as locations and directions before starting the communication. The users reach an agreement on determining a temporary signal timing by interacting with each other without leaking privacy. Final decisions are verifiable to all users, even if they have no a priori agreement and processes of consensus. The mode not only achieves the aim of privacy preservation but also supports responsibility investigation for historical agreements via ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) and blockchain technology. Extensive experimental results demonstrated that our mode is efficient and practical.
Sahil Garg, Kuljeet Kaur, Georges Kaddoum, François Gagnon · 5 authors
Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new technology in modern electric power transmission networks. It allows bi-directional flow of communication and electricity between electric vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG), in order to provide more sophisticated energy trading. However, due to the involvement of a huge amount of trading data and the presence of untrusted entities in the visiting networks, the underlying V2G infrastructure suffers from various security and privacy challenges. Although, several solutions have been proposed in the literature to address these problems, issues like lack of mutual authentication and anonymity, incapability to protect against several attack vectors, generation of huge overhead, and dependency on centralized infrastructures make security and privacy issues even more challenging. To address the above mentioned problems, in this paper, we propose a blockchain oriented hierarchical authentication mechanism for rewarding EVs. The overall process is broadly classified into the following phases: 1) System Initialization, 2) Registration, 3) Hierarchical Mutual Authentication, and 4) Consensus; wherein blockchain's distributed ledger has been employed for transaction execution in distributed V2G environments while Elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) has been used for hierarchical authentication. The designed hierarchical authentication mechanism has been employed to preserve the anonymity of EVs and support mutual authentication between EVs, charging stations (CSs) and the central aggregator (CAG). Additionally, it also supports minimal communicational and computational overheads on resource constrained EVs. Further, formal security verification of the proposed scheme on widely accepted Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool validates its safeness against different security attacks.
Kuljeet Kaur, Sahil Garg, Georges Kaddoum, François Gagnon · 5 authors
With the increasing development of advanced communication technologies, vehicles are becoming smarter and more connected. Due to the tremendous growth of various vehicular applications, a huge amount of data is generated through advanced on-board devices and is deemed critical to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. However, cloud based models often fall short in applications where latency and mobility are critical. In order to fully realize the potential of vehicular networks, the challenges of efficient communication and computation need to be addressed. In this direction, vehicular fog computing (VFC) has emerged which extends the concept of fog computing to conventional vehicular networks. It is a geographically distributed paradigm that has the potential to conduct time-critical and data-intensive tasks by pushing intelligence (i.e. computing resources, storage, and application services) in the vicinity of end vehicles. However secure and reliable transmission are of significant importance in highly-mobile vehicular networks in order to ensure the optimal Quality of Service (QoS). In this direction, several authentication mechanisms have been proposed in the literature but most of them are found unfit due to absence of decentralization, anonymity, and trust characteristics. Thus, an effective cross-datacenter authentication and key-exchange scheme based on blockchain and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed in this paper. Here, the distributed ledger of blockchain is used for maintaining the network information while the highly secure ECC is employed for mutual authentication between vehicles and road side units (RSUs). Additionally, the proposed scheme is lightweight and scalable for the considered VFC setup. The performance evaluation results against the existing state-of-the-art reveal that the proposed scheme accomplishes enhanced security features with reduced computational and communicational overheads. Further, its extensive evaluation on the widely applicable Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool guarantee its safeness against different attack vectors.
While direct allocation of spectrum and evolved medium access protocols provide a base for ubiquitous wireless connectivity, the existing TCP/IP and OSI models were designed for wired networks and do not address open interconnection of air interfaces. Without an interconnection model for the air interface, existing network designs continue to tie wireless medium access to that of the backhaul provider for ownership of access and identity trust, resulting in limitations on functionality and coverage. In this paper, we propose a novel solution to access ownership and identity trust by extending the TCP network standard, under a new model we propose, named TCP-Air which integrates distributed ledger technologies directly at the air interface. Further, we present two use cases of the TCP-Air model, demonstrating applications not feasible under existing permissioned-access network designs.
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a particular subclass of mobile ad hoc networks that raise a number of security challenges, notably from the way users authenticate the network. Authentication technologies based on existing security policies and access control rules in such networks assume full trust on Roadside Unit (RSU) and authentication servers. The disclosure of authentication parameters enables user's trace-ability over the network. VANETs' trusted entities (e.g. RSU) can utilize such information to track a user traveling behavior, violating user privacy and anonymity. In this paper, we proposed a novel, light-weight, Adaptive Group-based Zero Knowledge Proof-Authentication Protocol (AGZKP-AP) for VANETs. The proposed authentication protocol is capable of offering various levels of users' privacy settings based on the type of services available on such networks. Our scheme is based on the Zero-Knowledge-Proof (ZKP) crypto approach with the support of trade-off options. Users have the option to make critical decisions on the level of privacy and the amount of resources usage they prefer such as short system response time versus the number of private information disclosures. Furthermore, AGZKP-AP is incorporated with a distributed privilege control and revoking mechanism that render user's private information to law enforcement in case of a traffic violation.
As the Internet of Vehicle (IOV) being widely applied throughout our daily life, how to secure data privacy of each vehicle is nowadays a hot topic. Taking an aim of solving this problem, a privacy protection system on double-layered chain basis is designed to eliminate the said security risk during vehicle data communication. At the same time, the nontampering nature of the block chain is used to realize reasonable arbitration in traffic accident disputes, vehicle insurance claims, and other states of affairs. Specifically, an IOV double-layered chain model is constructed to simulate a semicentralized system that is convenient for government to supervise; also, a RSA protocol based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) is designed to bring safety and zero-knowledge property to the system; finally, we give the application scenario of this IOV privacy protection system based on double-layered chain that it can be widely used in vehicle-sharing industry. The communication costs, respectively, under double-layered chain and single-layered chain frameworks, are compared to prove that the double-layered structure does save cost. Thus an IOV privacy scheme that is safer and more cost-efficient is given.
Increasingly, connected cars are becoming a decentralized data platform. With greater autonomy, they have growing needs for computation and perceiving the world around them through sensors. While todays generation of vehicles carry all the necessary sensor data and computation on board, we envision a future where vehicles can cooperate to increase their perception of the world beyond their immediate view, resulting in greater safety, coordination and more comfortable experience for their human occupants. In order for vehicles to obtain data, compute and other services from other vehicles or road side infrastructure, it is important to be able to make micro payments for those services and for the services to run seamlessly despite the challenges posed by mobility and ephemeral interactions with a dynamic set of neighboring devices. We present MOTIVE, a trusted and decentralized framework that allows vehicles to make peer to peer micropayments for data, compute and other services obtained from other vehicles or road side infrastructure within radio range. The framework utilizes distributed ledger technologies including smart contracts to enable autonomous operation and trusted interactions between vehicles and nearby entities.
Due to exponential growth in the daily usage of vehicles, the traffic congestion and roadside accidents are increasing day by day. The communication among vehicles is critical to avoid the emergencies and to address the issue of congestion of vehicles. Internet of vehicles provides the communication channel between the vehicles, but existing solutions require a centralized communication system to distribute the message and to authenticate the source. This centralized infrastructure is subject to disturb the vehicular communication in case of server breakdown or due to any natural disaster where hardware stops working. Also, the centralized system proves to be costly as the communication of each vehicle necessitates access to the central server resulting in the more resource requirement. A secure distributed system is required to avoid the emergencies and reduce the traffic rate. To address the issues, we proposed a secure distributed message-passing framework that does not require a centralized server, and it rates the credibility of message source using blockchain technology. The messages in the proposed system are forwarded through dedicated short-range communication protocol. To validate the proposed system, we have performed different simulations using SUMO, OMNET, and VEINS. The results demonstrated an increase in the average speed of vehicles that showed a reduced congestion rate. Moreover, our system identified the malicious vehicles with 77.1% accuracy.
Sara Nadeem, Muhammad Rizwan, Fahad Ahmad, Jaweria Manzoor
Cognitive radio, ad hoc networks' applications are continuously increasing in wireless communication globally. In vehicles' environment, cognitive radio technology with mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) enables vehicles to monitor the available channels and to effectively function in these frequencies through sharing ongoing information with drivers and different frameworks to enhance traffic safety on roads. To fulfill the computational storage resources’ limitations of a specific vehicle, Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) is used by merging VANET with cloud computing. Cloud computing requires high security and protection because authenticate users and attackers have the same rights in VCC. The security is enhanced in CRVANETs, but the distributed nature of cloud unlocks a door for dissimilar attacks, such as trust modal, data security, connection fault and query tracking attacks. This paper proposes an effective and secured blockchain scheme-based distributed cloud architecture in place of conventional cloud architecture to secure the drivers’ privacy with low cost and on-demand sensing procedure in CRVANETs ecosystem.
Shihan Bao, Yue Cao, Ao Lei, Philip Asuquo · 7 authors
Research into the established area of the intelligent transportation system is evolving into the Internet of Vehicles, a fast-moving research area, fuelled in part by rapid changes based on cyber-physical systems. It needs to be recognized that existing vehicular communication systems are susceptible to privacy vulnerabilities which require addressing. A practical challenge is that many vehicular communication applications and services make use of basic safety messages that contain the identity of the vehicle, location, and other personal data. A popular way of dealing with this privacy issue is to utilize a pseudonym change scheme to protect the vehicle's identity and location. However, many such schemes suffer that the cost grows and the certificate management difficulty raises with the number of pseudonyms generated and stored, casting doubt of the economic feasibility of that approach. We propose a decentralized blockchain-based solution for pseudonym management that overcomes these limitations. This scheme consists of pseudonym distribution and a shuffle operation, allowing the reuse of existing pseudonyms to different vehicles. The results reported here, including those from our simulations, demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reuse existing pseudonyms and achieve a better degree of anonymity at a lower cost than existing schemes.
The development of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) has facilitated adaptive traffic signal control for intelligent transportation. In this paper, we proposed the traffic signal control mechanism based on a consortium blockchain, which has saved plenty of financial and material resources. It has solved the centralization problems and minimized the high degree of human intervention in the process of traffic signal light management. As a road is congested, the vehicle forwards road condition messages. The traffic department (TD) adjusts the signal light duration to allow the synergistic optimization management, and control the traffic vehicle status through a smart contract. In addition, we propose a credibility mechanism to effectively prevent vehicles from broadcasting mendacious messages and malicious requests, thereby enhancing the credibility of vehicles and providing a secure and trustworthy communication environment for the VANETs. It is hazardous for vehicles to send plaintext messages in an open environment because their privacy and security are threatened. Thus, we utilize ElGamal encryption and group signature algorithm to guarantee the confidentiality, privacy, and non-repudiation of any information. The safety analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the scheme is feasible and valid, and it can facilitate the adaptive control of traffic signal lights.
This paper attempts to solve the security problems in communication, consensus-making and authentication of nodes in the Internet of vehicles (IoV) for intelligent transport. Considering the defects of the central node and service complexity in the IoV, the blockchain was integrated with the IoV to create a decentralized mechanism for communication and consensus-making. In the architecture of the blockchain-based IoV, the Byzantine consensus algorithm based on time sequence and gossip protocol is used to complete information communication and consensus authentication, which not only ensures communication security, improves the consensus efficiency of nodes, but also improves the fault tolerance of the algorithm. The experimental results show that our algorithm outshined the traditional authentication method in information security and consensus efficiency of the IoV. The research findings provide a reference solution to the authentication problems in the IoV for intelligent transport.
Razi Iqbal, Talal Ashraf Butt, Muhammad Afzaal, Khaled Salah
The Internet of things is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet that is being materialized with the integration of billions of smart objects. The state-of-the-art communication technologies have enabled the previously isolated devices to become an active part of the Internet. This constant connectivity opens new avenues for novel applications such as the realization of social Internet of things and its subdomain the social Internet of vehicles. Socializing requires sharing of information that entails trust, especially in an open and broad social environment. This article highlights the key factors involved in conceptualizing an efficient trust model for social Internet of vehicles. Furthermore, it focuses on the unique challenges involved in designing the trust models for social Internet of vehicles. Several trust models exist in literature; however, most of the existing trust models are specific to their domains, for example, Internet of things, social Internet of things, or general vehicular networks. This article presents a brief review of the trust models that have the potential to be implemented in Social Internet of vehicles. Finally, the authors present an overview of how trending concepts and emerging technologies like blockchain and fog computing can assist in developing a trust-based social Internet of vehicles model for high-efficiency, decentralized architecture and dynamic nature of vehicular networks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has integrated the sensor network silos to the Internet and enabled the provision of value-added services across these networks. These smart devices are now becoming socially conscious by following the social Internet of Things (SIoT) model that empowers them to create and maintain social relationships among them. The Social Internet of Vehicle (SIoV) is one application of SIoT in the vehicular domain that has evolved the existing intelligent transport system (ITS) and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) to the next phase of Intelligent by adding socializing aspect and constant connectivity. SIoV generates a massive amount of real-time data enriched with context and social relationship information about vehicles, drivers, passengers, and the surrounding environment. Therefore, the role of privacy management becomes essential in SIoV, as data is collected and stored at different layers of its architecture. The challenge of privacy is aggravated because the dynamic nature of SIoV poses a major threat in its adoption. Motivated by the need to address these aspects, this paper identifies the challenges involved in managing privacy in SIoV. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the privacy issues and factors that are essential to be considered for preserving privacy in SIoV environments from different perspectives including the privacy of a person, behavior and action, communication, data and image, thoughts and feelings, location and space, and association. In addition, the paper discusses the blockchain-based solutions to preserve privacy for SIoV.
The next generation of vehicles will be autonomous, connected, electric, and intelligent with distinct requirements such as high mobility, low latency, real-time applications, seamless connectivity, and security. Blockchain can provide a good solution to the issue of secure message dissemination or secure information sharing in vehicular networks with a weak trust relationship among the nodes. In this paper, we investigate the design of a regional blockchain for VANETs, where the blockchain is shared among nodes in a geographically bounded area. We investigate how to design the regional blockchain while achieving a low 51% attack success probability. We derive a condition that guarantees a low 51% attack success probability in terms of the numbers of good nodes and malicious nodes, the message delivery time, and the puzzle computation time. The condition can provide a useful guideline for selection of several control parameters guaranteeing the stable operation of the blockchain. We run several simulations to show the validity of the condition and investigate the effects of various parameters on the 51% attack success probability. Our analysis and simulation results show that maintaining a low message delivery time for good nodes is very important in protecting the stability of the blockchain system.
This paper investigates how mobility affects the performance of a blockchain system operating in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). The mobility of nodes incurs a unique challenge to a blockchain system due to continuous change and dynamicity in the connectivity of the nodes. Specifically, the mobility makes a proof-of-work (PoW) process difficult since while moving the nodes can only have a limited length of time for a “rendezvous” to exchange a new block for verification. For this reason, accurate modeling for the block exchange behavior in a VANET is also challenging, which nevertheless has not been discussed in previous studies. Therefore, this paper provides an analysis framework that formulates the impact of mobility on a blockchain system's performance in a VANET based on three key metrics: (i) the probability of a successful addition of block to the chain; (ii) the stability of a rendezvous, and; (iii) the number of blocks exchanged during a rendezvous. The closed-form expressions and numerical results display the performance of a blockchain system in various scenarios in a VANET.
Xiaoliang Wang, Pengjie Zeng, Nick Patterson, Frank Jiang · 5 authors
Thanks to the rapid development in mobile vehicles and wireless technologies, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become an attractive application that can provide a large number of mobile services for drivers. Vehicles can be informed of the mobile position, direction, speed, and other real-time information of nearby vehicles to avoid traffic jams and accidents. However, the environments of IoV could be dangerous in the absence of security protections. Due to the openness and self-organization of IoV, there are enormous malicious attackers. To guarantee the safety of mobile services, we propose an effective decentralized authentication mechanism for IoV on the basis of the consensus algorithm of blockchain technology. The simulation under the veins framework is carried out to verify the feasibility of the scheme in reducing the selfish behavior and malicious attacks in IoV.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is one of the most promising application in the communications of smart vehicles and the smart transportation systems. However, authentication and privacy of users are still two vital issues in VANETs. It is crucial to prevent internal vehicles from broadcasting the forged messages while preserving the privacy of vehicles against the tracking attack. Moreover, in the traditional mode, the transactional data storage provides no distributed and decentralized security, so that the third party initiates the dishonest behaviors possibly. In this paper, based on blockchain technique, we propose a traceable and decentralized the Internet of Vehicle system framework for communication among smart vehicles by employing of a secure access authentication scheme between vehicles and RoadSide Units (RSUs). On the one hand, this scheme allows that vehicles employ pseudonyms for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications anonymously in the non-fully trusted environment. On the other hand, the transparency of vehicles in authentication and announcement is preformed efficiently by the blockchain technology. In addition, the transaction information is tamper-resistant that provides the distributed and decentralized property for the different cloud servers. With the help of Certificate Authority (CA) and the RoadSide Units (RSUs), our proposal achieves the conditional privacy to trace the real identity of the malicious vehicle in the anonymous announcements as well. Finally, through the theoretical analysis and simulations, our scheme is able to construct a secure and decentralized system framework of VANETs with accountability and privacy preservation.
Sharing traffic information on the vehicular network can help in the implementation of intelligent traffic management, such as car accident warnings, road construction notices, and driver route changes to reduce traffic congestion earlier. In the future, in the case of autonomous driving, traffic information will be exchanged more frequently and more immediately. Once the exposed traffic incident is incorrect, the driving route will be misleading, and the driving response may be in danger. The blockchain ensures the correctness of data and tampers resistance in the consensus mechanism, which can solve such similar problems. This paper proposes a proof-of-event consensus concept applicable to vehicular networks rather than proof-of-work or proof-of-authority approaches. The traffic data are collected through the roadside units, and the passing vehicles will verify the correctness when receiving the event notification. In addition, a two-phase transaction on blockchain is introduced to send warning messages in appropriate regions and time periods. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively feedback the correctness of traffic events and provide traceable events with trust verification.
The modern intelligent transportation system brings not only new opportunities for vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) services but also new challenges for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Apart from enhanced network performance, a practical and reliable security scheme is needed to handle the trust management while preserving user privacy at the same time. The emerging 5G mobile communication system is viewed as a prominent technology for ultra-reliable, low-latency wireless communication services. Furthermore, incorporating software-defined network (SDN) architecture into the 5G-VANET enables global information gathering and network control. Hence, real-time IoT services on transportation monitoring and reporting can be well supported. Both pave the way for an innovative vehicular security scheme. This paper investigates the security and privacy issue in the transportation system and the vehicular IoT environment in SDN-enabled 5G-VANET. Due to the decentralized and immutable characteristics of blockchain, a blockchain-based security framework is designed to support the vehicular IoT services, i.e., real-time cloud-based video report and trust management on vehicular messages. This paper explicitly illustrates the SDN-enabled 5G-VANET model and the scheduling procedures of the blockchain-based framework. The numerical simulation results also show that malicious vehicular nodes or messages can be well detected while the overhead and impact on the network performance are acceptable for large-scale scenarios. Through case studies and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate our design substantially guarantees a secure and trustworthy vehicular IoT environment with user privacy preserved.