A vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) can improve the flow of traffic to facilitate intelligent transportation and to provide convenient information services, where the goal is to provide self-organizing data transmission capabilities for vehicles on the road to enable applications, such as assisted vehicle driving and safety warnings. VANETs are affected by issues such as identity validity and message reliability when vehicle nodes share data with other nodes. The method used to allow the vehicle nodes to upload sensor data to a trusted center for storage is susceptible to security risks, such as malicious tampering and data leakage. To address these security challenges, we propose a data security sharing and storage system based on the consortium blockchain (DSSCB). This digital signature technique based on the nature of bilinear pairing for elliptic curves is used to ensure the reliability and integrity when transmitting data to a node. The emerging consortium blockchain technology provides a decentralized, secure, and reliable database, which is maintained by the entire network node. In DSSCB, smart contracts are used to limit the triggering conditions for preselected nodes when transmitting and storing data and for allocating data coins to vehicles that participate in the contribution of data. The security analysis and performance evaluations demonstrated that our DSSCB solution is more secure and reliable in terms of data sharing and storage. Compared with the traditional blockchain system, the time required to confirm the data block was reduced by nearly six times and the transmission efficiency was improved by 83.33%.
The blockchain is a safe, reliable and innovative mechanism for managing numerous vehicles seeking connectivity. However, following the principles of the blockchain, the number of transactions required to update ledgers pose serious issues for vehicles as these may consume the maximum available energy. To resolve this, an efficient model is presented in this letter which is capable of handling the energy demands of the blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles (IoV) by optimally controlling the number of transactions through distributed clustering. Numerical results suggest that the proposed approach is 40.16% better in terms of energy conservation and 82.06% better in terms of the number of transactions required to share the entire blockchain-data compared with the traditional blockchain.
Recently, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have gained extensive attention from both academia and industry. AVs are a complex system composed of many subsystems, making them a typical target for attackers. Therefore, the firmware of the different subsystems needs to be updated to the latest version by the manufacturer to fix bugs and introduce new features, e.g., using security patches. In this paper, we propose a distributed firmware update scheme for the AVs' subsystems, leveraging blockchain and smart contract technology. A consortium blockchain made of different AVs manufacturers is used to ensure the authenticity and integrity of firmware updates. Instead of depending on centralized third parties to distribute the new updates, we enable AVs, namely distributors, to participate in the distribution process and we take advantage of their mobility to guarantee high availability and fast delivery of the updates. To incentivize AVs to distribute the updates, a reward system is established that maintains a credit reputation for each distributor account in the blockchain. A zero-knowledge proof protocol is used to exchange the update in return for a proof of distribution in a trust-less environment. Moreover, we use attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to ensure that only authorized AVs will be able to download and use a new update. Our analysis indicates that the additional cryptography primitives and exchanged transactions do not affect the operation of the AVs network. Also, our security analysis demonstrates that our scheme is efficient and secure against different attacks.
Paulo Bartolomeu, Emanuel Vieira, Joaquim Ferreira
The emergence of distributed ledger technologies in the vehicular applications' arena is decisively contributing to their improvement and shaping of the public opinion about their future. The Tangle is a technology at its infancy, but showing enormous potential to become a key solution by addressing several of the blockchain's limitations. This paper focuses on the use of the Tangle to improve the security of both in-vehicle and off-vehicle functions in vehicular applications. To this end, key operational performance parameters are identified, evaluated and discussed with emphasis on their limitations and potential impact in future vehicular applications.
This paper discusses the application of the blockchain technology to wireless communications, in particular, for enhancing the security of vehicular communications. The idea that the blockchain will become a key solution for ensuring security and data consistency has long been controversial, even in more traditional areas such as finance or real-estate, for example. In this paper, an analysis of the two opposing sides is put forward and a review of the key aspects that need further evolution to ensure the blockchain's survival is presented. In the context of vehicular communications existing blockchain applications are examined with focus on certificate and reputation management, and message forwarding promotion. In this scope, the future of the blockchain is debated with emphasis on the key limitations of public implementations.
Current digital certification revocation systems are insufficient in the application scenario of multiple certification authorities (CAs), and it leads to a lack of mutual trust, access stability, and timeliness of data synchronization between CAs. We propose a decentralized digital certificate revocation system based on consortium blockchain technology with a secret sharing scheme. It can invalidate the digital certificate in special cases to protect the user's information and property security. Based on the characteristics of the decentralized consensus mechanism, consortium blockchain technology is the core technology of the system. The scheme achieves collaborative management of digital certificate revocation lists (CRLs) by multiple CAs, and introduces secret sharing scheme, further safeguarding the reliability of the maintenance process, and then the online certificate status protocol (OCSP) can be developed based on this system. This system is security, effective, and cannot be tampered. Compared with the traditional revocation scheme, it achieves trusted and reliable CRL system above multiple CAs, which can provide new ideas for the way of digital certificate revocation and expand the application range of blockchain technology.
Aug 1, 2018·2018 17th IEEE International Conference On Trust, Security And Privacy In Computing And Communications/ 12th IEEE International Conference On Big Data Science And Engineering (TrustCom/BigDataSE)
Authentication and revocation of users in Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETS) are two vital security aspects. It is extremely important to perform these actions promptly and efficiently. The past works addressing these issues lack in mitigating the reliance on the centralized trusted authority and therefore do not provide distributed and decentralized security. This paper proposes a blockchain based authentication and revocation framework for vehicular networks, which not only reduces the computation and communication overhead by mitigating dependency on a trusted authority for identity verification, but also speedily updates the status of revocated vehicles in the shared blockchain ledger. In the proposed framework, vehicles obtain their Pseudo IDs from the Certificate Authority (CA), which are stored along with their certificate in the immutable authentication blockchain and the pointer corresponding to the entry in blockchain, enables the Road Side Units (RSUs) to verify the identity of a vehicle on road. The efficiency and performance of the framework has been validated using the Omnet++ simulation environment.
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. Due to the inefficiency and limited usage of certain blockchain features designed for the traditional cryptocurrency applications, we design a new "proof of event" mechanism to achieve indisputable accident forensics by ensuring that event information is trustable and verifiable. Specifically, 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. The security capability of the proposed scheme is also analyzed against different threat and attack models.
The public key infrastructure (PKI) based authentication protocol provides the basic security services for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, trust and privacy are still open issues due to the unique characteristics of vehicles. It is crucial for VANETs to prevent internal vehicles from broadcasting forged messages while simultaneously protecting the privacy of each vehicle against tracking attacks. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based anonymous reputation system (BARS) to break the linkability between real identities and public keys to preserve privacy. The certificate and revocation transparency is implemented efficiently using two blockchains. We design a trust model to improve the trustworthiness of messages relying on the reputation of the sender based on both direct historical interactions and indirect opinions about the sender. Experiments are conducted to evaluate BARS in terms of security and performance and the results show that BARS is able to establish distributed trust management, while protecting the privacy of vehicles.
One remarkable feature of vehicular ad hoc networks is characterized by an opportunistic communications by means of store-carry-forward message relaying which requires the cooperation of vehicles on the networks. However, we cannot be sure that all vehicles willingly contribute their computing resources to the networks for message forwarding with no rewards for their efforts in real-world scenarios. In addition, unfortunately, there may exist some selfish and greedy node which may not help others but tend to take their own gain. To cope with this challenge, incentive mechanisms are generally considered as the promising solution. In this paper, we design a Bitcoin-based secure and reliable incentive scheme for cooperative vehicular delay tolerant networking services. Bitcoin is the well-known worldwide cryptocurrency and digital payment system whose implementation relies on cryptographic techniques, which makes it possible to develop a practical credit-based incentive scheme on the vehicular networks at a low cost. We also implement Bitcoin transaction scripts to handle our proposed incentive scheme.
Regio A. Michelin, Ali Dorri, Roben Castagna Lunardi, Marco Steger · 7 authors
There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consumers and producers in smart cities. Vehicles can use smart city data for decision-making, such as dynamic routing based on traffic conditions. Moreover, the multitude of embedded sensors in vehicles can collectively produce a rich data set of the urban landscape that can be used to provide a range of services. Key to the success of this vision is a scalable and private architecture for trusted data sharing. This paper proposes a framework called SpeedyChain, that leverages blockchain technology to allow smart vehicles to share their data while maintaining privacy, integrity, resilience and non-repudiation in a decentralized, and tamper-resistant manner. Differently from traditional blockchain usage (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), the proposed framework uses a blockchain design that decouples the data stored in the transactions from the block header, thus allowing for fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block to avoid large sized blocks is proposed. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.
In order to solve the problem of illegal member’s tracking attack, which caused by the vehicle units’ privacy disclosure in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), a vehicle identity authentication protocol based on lightweight group signature was proposed by analysis of topology and communication characteristics of VANETs in this paper, which can authenticate the vehicles anonymously in a fast and efficient way. The protocol has five stages. In the initialization phase, the public/private key pairs and system parameters of the group were generated by the VANETs system, then the group public key and system parameters were distributed to the on-board units by the roadside auxiliary facilities. The group private key was kept by the group manager. When a vehicle unit entered VANETs, the unit’s own identity was submitted to the group manager by the blind signature. A group certificate would be distributed to the vehicle unit by the group manager when authentication passed. In the cooperative communication stage, the vehicle member who owned the group certificates signed the state information with the valid certificate and group public key, then sent it to the nearby vehicle units by the car sensors, and achieved cooperative driving with surrounding vehicles. In the message verification stage, only can the legal vehicle members open the received status information by using group public key, but couldn’t know the true identity of the message sender. In this way, the anonymous communication among vehicles was realized. In the stage of signature verification, when a vehicle unit broadcasted a false message for the purpose of exclusively using road resource and caused traffic accident, the group manager can open the signature of the message by using the group private key, and traversed the corresponding vehicle members to carry on the accountability. The innovation of the paper was the usage of improved lightweight group signature technology, which could ensure that the length of group public key and group signature didn’t depend on the number of group members. Zero knowledge proof was also used as a means of membership authentication which improved the speed of authentication among the members. The security of the protocol was analyzed and proved mathematically in this paper, and a LAN simulation platform composed of 100 PC machines was built to simulate the cooperative communication among vehicle units in VANETs. The experimental results showed that authentication time of the protocol was about 7 ms among 100 vehicle users. The performance of the proposed protocol is superior to the contrasted schemes. It greatly reduced the storage and calculation burden of the vehicle units during the process of identity authentication.
Chuka Oham, Raja Jurdak, Salil S. Kanhere, Ali Dorri · 5 authors
In this paper, we propose a partitioned BlockChain based Framework for Auto-insurance Claims and Adjudication (B-FICA) for CAVs that tracks both sensor data and entity interactions with two-sided verification. B-FICA uses permissioned BC with two partitions to share information on a need to know basis. It also uses multi-signed transactions for proof of execution of instructions, for reliability and auditability and also uses a dynamic lightweight consensus and validation protocol to prevent evidence alteration. Qualitative evaluation shows that B-FICA is resilient to several security attacks from potential liable entities. Finally, simulations show that compared to the state of the art, B-FI CA reduces processing time and its delay overhead is negligible for practical scenarios and at marginal security cost.
This paper proposes a novel adaptation of blockchain technology to information exchanges among vehicles traveling in a platoon. The aim is to protect platoon member privacy and security while providing a rapid sharing of telemetry data. We have identified key protocols for a distributed cryptographic authentication among vehicles in transit within a platoon. This work heralds consideration of cyber-attack types on platoons and our proposed remedies.
Víctor Manuel Sámano Ortega, Faiza Bouchmal, José F. Monserrat
Vehicular communications, though a reality, must continue to evolve to support higher throughput and, above all, ultralow latency to accommodate new use cases, such as the fully autonomous vehicle. Cybersecurity must be assured since the risk of losing control of vehicles if a country were to come under attack is a matter of national security. This article presents the technological enablers that ensure security requirements are met. Under the umbrella of a dedicated network slice, this article proposes the use of content-centric networking (CCN), instead of conventional transmission control protocol/Internet protocol (TCP/IP) routing and permissioned blockchains that allow for the dynamic control of the source reliability, and the integrity and validity of the information exchanged.
Chuka Oham, Salil S. Kanhere, Raja Jurdak, Sanjay Jha
The advent of autonomous vehicles is envisaged to disrupt the auto insurance\nliability model.Compared to the the current model where liability is largely\nattributed to the driver,autonomous vehicles necessitate the consideration of\nother entities in the automotive ecosystem including the auto\nmanufacturer,software provider,service technician and the vehicle owner.The\nproliferation of sensors and connecting technologies in autonomous vehicles\nenables an autonomous vehicle to gather sufficient data for liability\nattribution,yet increased connectivity exposes the vehicle to attacks from\ninteracting entities.These possibilities motivate potential liable entities to\nrepudiate their involvement in a collision event to evade liability. While the\ndata collected from vehicular sensors and vehicular communications is an\nintegral part of the evidence for arbitrating liability in the event of an\naccident,there is also a need to record all interactions between the\naforementioned entities to identify potential instances of negligence that may\nhave played a role in the accident.In this paper,we propose a BlockChain(BC)\nbased framework that integrates the concerned entities in the liability model\nand provides untampered evidence for liability attribution and adjudication.We\nfirst describe the liability attribution model, identify key requirements and\ndescribe the adversarial capabilities of entities. Also,we present a detailed\ndescription of data contributing to evidence.Our framework uses permissioned BC\nand partitions the BC to tailor data access to relevant BC\nparticipants.Finally,we conduct a security analysis to verify that the\nidentified requirements are met and resilience of our proposed framework to\nidentified attacks.\n
Today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them. These developments help create smart and connected (e.g., self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies, and maintenance service providers for various applications. One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is forensic analysis of traffic accidents. The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrumental in post-accident scenarios to discover the faulty party, particularly for self-driving vehicles. With the opportunity of being able to access various information in cars, we propose a permissioned blockchain framework among the various elements involved to manage the collected vehicle-related data. Specifically, we first integrate vehicular public key infrastructure (VPKI) to the proposed blockchain to provide membership establishment and privacy. Next, we design a fragmented ledger that will store detailed data related to vehicles such as maintenance information/ history, car diagnosis reports, and so on. The proposed forensic framework enables trustless, traceable, and privacy-aware post-accident analysis with minimal storage and processing overhead.
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a vital role in enabling smart transportation systems by facilitating communication between vehicles. However, existing vehicular announcement systems face two major challenges: preserving user privacy and motivating users to share reliable traffic information. In this paper, we propose CreditCoin, a privacy-presing blockchain-based incentive announcement network. The system utilizes an anonymous vehicular announcement aggregation protocol combined with blockchain technology to ensure secure, tamper-resistant, and decentralized communication. Users can broadcast traffic updates anonymously while earning incentives for participation, thereby improving network reliability. A Trace Manager enables conditional privacy by identifying malicious users without compromising honest participants. The proposed system is implemented using Python, Web3, and a simulated VANET environment. Experimental results demonstrate improved efficiency, reduced computation time, and enhanced data reliability compared to traditional approaches. This work contributes toward secure and incentive-driven communication in smart transportation systems. In this paper, we propose CreditCoin, a privacy-preserving blockchain-based incentive announcement network. The system utilizes an anonymous vehicular announcement aggregation protocol combined with blockchain technology to ensure secure, tamper-resistant, and decentralized communication. Users can broadcast traffic updates anonymously while earning incentives for participation, thereby improving network reliability. A Trace Manager enables conditional privacy by identifying malicious users without compromising honest participants. Keywords— VANET; Blockchain; Privacy Preservation; Incentive Mechanism; Smart Vehicles; CreditCoin
The vehicle to everything (V2X) requires the real-time integration of all kinds of information on roads, pedestrians, the environment, and vehicles themselves. This information also needs to be shared with other vehicles. The effective integration of information and the strong privacy protection are the key restrictions on the development of the V2X. The previous privacy protection model has mainly focused on the centralized network, and there were problems with the centralized gateway and single-point decision, which were not suitable for the decentralized scenario. Therefore, this paper proposes a remote attestation security model based on a privacy-preserving blockchain. The overall model involves two core steps. First, the vehicle provides the network with an evidence of a credible identity and integrity. Secured, the vehicles in the network calculate the nodes to make their respective decisions, and the accounting nodes summarize the sub-conclusions, form the final results, and write them into data blocks. The analysis shows that it possesses the security features of decentralization, traceability, anonymity, irreplaceability, and high efficiency. The model framework, core block chain structure, and protocol process are described in detail. The experimental results based on a realistic infrastructure are presented. These experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively enhance the security of the communications of intelligent vehicles in the V2X.
Noureddine Lasla, Mohamed Younis, Wassim Znaïdi, Dhafer Ben Arbia
Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (C- ITS) enables inter-networking of vehicles for alerts exchanging in order to improve road safety. While this technology is about to enter the market in the upcoming years, critical questions related to the communication security continue to be challenging research concerns. Current solutions to secure inter-vehicle communication depend mainly on the use of digital certificates for authentication. However, such an approach imposes significant overhead on vehicles since it is computationally demanding and requires validation of the certificate within a limited period. In addition, relying on a central node for deciding on issuing and revoking certificates introduces a single point of failure and could even risk the safety of motorists. In this paper, we propose the use of Blockchain to keep track of the certificate of each vehicle (valid or revoked) in distributed and immutable records. In essence we replace certificate verification with a lightweight blockchain-based authentication approach. In addition, we propose a fully distributed vehicle admission/revocation scheme. We show that our scheme could alleviate the computation overhead and enhance the response time while improving the overall system security.
In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain‐based contractual routing (BCR) protocol for a network of untrusted IoT devices. In contrast to conventional secure routing protocols in which a central authority (CA) is required to facilitate the identification and authentication of each device, the BCR protocol operates in a distributed manner with no CA. The BCR protocol utilizes smart contracts to discover a route to a destination or data gateway within heterogeneous IoT networks. Any intermediary device can guarantee a route from a source IoT device to a destination device or gateway. We compare the performance of BCR with that of the Ad-hoc On‐Demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol in a network of 14 devices. The results show that the routing overhead of the BCR protocol is 5 times lower compared to AODV at the cost of a slightly lower packet delivery ratio. BCR is fairly resistant to both Blackhole and Greyhole attacks. The results show that the BCR protocol enables distributed routing in heterogeneous IoT networks.
The public key infrastructure-based authentication protocol provides basic security services for the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, trust and privacy are still open issues due to the unique characteristics of VANETs. It is crucial to prevent internal vehicles from broadcasting forged messages while simultaneously preserving the privacy of vehicles against the tracking attacks. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based anonymous reputation system (BARS) to establish a privacy-preserving trust model for VANETs. The certificate and revocation transparency is implemented efficiently with the proofs of presence and absence based on the extended blockchain technology. The public keys are used as pseudonyms in communications without any information about real identities for conditional anonymity. In order to prevent the distribution of forged messages, a reputation evaluation algorithm is presented relying on both direct historical interactions and indirect opinions about vehicles. A set of experiments is conducted to evaluate BARS in terms of security, validity, and performance, and the results show that BARS is able to establish a trust model with transparency, conditional anonymity, efficiency, and robustness for VANETs.
Rens W. van der Heijden, Felix Engelmann, David Mödinger, Franziska Schönig · 5 authors
In this paper, we propose a new Blockchain-based message and revocation accountability system called Blackchain. Combining a distributed ledger with existing mechanisms for security in V2X communication systems, we design a distributed event data recorder (EDR) that satisfies traditional accountability requirements by providing a compressed global state. Unlike previous approaches, our distributed ledger solution provides an accountable revocation mechanism without requiring trust in a single misbehavior authority, instead allowing a collaborative and transparent decision making process through Blackchain. This makes Blackchain an attractive alternative to existing solutions for revocation in a Security Credential Management System (SCMS), which suffer from the traditional disadvantages of PKIs, notably including centralized trust. Our proposal becomes scalable through the use of hierarchical consensus: individual vehicles dynamically create clusters, which then provide their consensus decisions as input for road-side units (RSUs), which in turn publish their results to misbehavior authorities. This authority, which is traditionally a single entity in the SCMS, responsible for the integrity of the entire V2X network, is now a set of authorities that transparently perform a revocation, whose result is then published in a global Blackchain state. This state can be used to prevent the issuance of certificates to previously malicious users, and also prevents the authority from misbehaving through the transparency implied by a global system state.