Xiaoqin Feng, Fuliang Lin, Tao Feng, Jianfeng Ma · 6 authors
Secure and efficient identity authentication is a fundamental requirement in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs); however, it remains challenging due to the highly dynamic network topology, stringent latency constraints, and the need for conditional privacy preservation. Existing authentication schemes either rely on public key infrastructures (PKI) with complex certificate management or introduce partially decentralized designs that still depend on trusted authorities, leading to inefficiencies and single points of failure. In this paper, we propose EBDA, an Ethereum-based fully distributed authentication mechanism for VANETs. The core innovation of EBDA is to replace the traditional PKI certificate system with a blockchain-maintained Graph of Trust (GoT). Through three dedicated smart contracts, EBDA fully decentralizes the management of vehicle identities and pseudonyms. Vehicles use pseudonyms to preserve privacy in Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications, while authentication is achieved certificate-free via transitive trust within the GoT. Importantly, latency-sensitive operations like message verification are executed off-chain through local checks, meeting VANETs’ strict real-time requirements. A prototype implementation and extensive evaluations demonstrate that EBDA significantly reduces authentication latency by at least 22.93% compared with representative blockchain-assisted and PKI-based baselines while maintaining low computational and storage overhead. These results confirm the feasibility of deploying GoT-based decentralized authentication in practical VANET environments.
Brijesh Kumar Chaurasia, Vinay Rishiwal, Mano Yadav, Man Mohan Shukla · 5 authors
In the internet of vehicles networks (IoV-N), vehicles exchange messages to improve traffic efficiency using fog and edge computing. Vehicles may make decisions based on exchanged messages in IoV-N. Therefore, security and key management in the IoV-N are the primary concerns. In this paper, key management for social IoV-N using blockchain is presented. This work also utilises non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to store and secure records such as keys, issuer identities, etc. on behalf of trusted static authorities such as the city-level transport authority (CTA). The paper also introduced bilinear pairing for key generation and secure exchange in the IoV-N. CTA makes up the key generation process at the fog layer to reduce latency, and the blockchain is stored in a data server at the cloud layer. Extensive simulation and results show that key management for social IoV-N is a secure, fast, and viable solution.
Authentication for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is essential for safe IoV connection. However, because of the peculiar structure of IoV, current authentication schemes heavily rely on Road Side Units (RSUs). An excessive number of RSUs will make it difficult to synchronize updates, which will make system authentication inefficient overall and prevent the reuse of authentication results. Based on this, this paper proposes a blockchain-based secure distributed authentication scheme for IoV. First, data processing and storage are decentralized to the edge of the network to reduce the communication delay and response time with the trusted authority (TA). Second, in the IoV authentication process, smart contract technology is used to achieve automatic triggering of the authentication process, and an optimized Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerant Consensus (PBFT) algorithm is designed to add the authentication information to the blockchain ledger so that the authentication results can be reused. Finally, this paper performs formal security verification and informal security analysis using and Real-Or-Random (ROR) oracle model and AVISPA tool. In addition, this paper performs a detailed evaluation of computation overhead and communication overhead and uses SUMO for simulation verification. The security analysis and performance evaluation show that the scheme meets the security requirements of IoV while having less communication and computation overhead.
Sadia Hussain, Shahzaib Tahir, Asif Masood, Hasan Tahir
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an incipient topic within the wider domain of the Internet of Things (IoT). Using this technology intelligent transportation systems (ITS) can be developed, whose main purpose is to ensure more safety, faster travel, reduced energy consumption and improved vehicle upkeep. Devices connected within the IoV transmit a vast amount of data, which leads to additional costs on the communication network along with data security concerns. This research considers the potential uses of blockchain technology for improving communication between independent vehicles. In this paper, a decentralized system is proposed to enhance the security and performance of financial transactions in the network of autonomous cars based on the Ethereum blockchain. Our system is divided into two modules: car registration and message alert generating. New vehicles are allowed on the network using the smart contract that has been written and published on the Ethereum Remix IDE. This is the contract code attached to the Metamask wallet. Another module, the message alert-generating module, allows an administrator to send alert messages to all registered cars via a web-based system to their wallet for an Ethereum gas cost. It ensures the reliability of data transferred between the self-driving cars through the use of blockchain-based systems. The data is, therefore, confirmed and vetted using the proof of work and stake consensus algorithm to bring out the truth. The transaction being made, the system will see to it that the transaction made is of integrity and trustable. By synching all these technologies and means of reaching an agreement, the blockchain secures not only the means of keeping and retaining the information of the kept within self-driving vehicles but also establishes a strong foundation of highest trust and transparency in the interaction between the vehicles on the network. Accordingly, a well-defined and reliable conceptual design for the communication systems of autonomous vehicles has been proposed. Future work and the unresolved issues of using blockchain for autonomous vehicles have also been deliberated over in detail.
Sixth-generation (6G) communication is emerging as seamless and massive connecting of almost everything. Therefore, vehicles, being extensively linked with human mobility, require a technological pace for compatibility with the 6G era. 6G will also potentially revolutionize the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication. However, this modernization will surface several security challenges in the complex heterogeneous architecture of V2X communication in 6G. Similarly, the expansion of V2X also introduces unconventional security risks and vulnerabilities. This paper aims to provide an overview of the security challenges and solutions for V2X communication in the upcoming 6G era to visualize the future of this research domain. This paper discusses the architecture and standards utilized in 6G enabled V2X communications and provisions a comprehensive analysis of V2X security in Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability, Authentication and Access Control (CIA3) domains. Thereby, we analyze the impact of the emerging technological concepts of Blockchain and Federated Learning (FL) in 6G enabled V2X communication. Thereby, we suggest a Blockchain-enabled FL based generic security architecture for V2X communication in 6G networks. At the conclusive end, the review highlights key lessons learned and the future research directions in the domain of security of V2X communications in the 6G including; Privacy in 3D Fog Computing, Privacy in Augmented Reality, C. Secure Software Defined Networking (SDN), Physical Layer Security In THz Spectrum, SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility) and Intrusion Detection using AI.
With the rise of smart vehicles, an intelligent transportation system intelligent transport system (ITS) learning from the tremendous volume of the data generated by the distributed vehicles is becoming a reality. blockchain (BC)-based federated learning (FL) facilities a highly secure and trustless collaborative learning framework; however, it could be inefficient for the time-sensitive services of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In this regard, this study investigates information dissemination delay in BC-based FL for IoV using a small world network-based peer selection strategy. Additionally, we also incorporate IoV specific informed decision for peer selection to facilitate even faster dissemination of information in the network and make BC-based system efficient. Network topology of vehicles is represented using a graph approach and based on that the information dissemination delay is formulated. The delay is compared between scenarios when peer selection strategy uses informed decision and that does not use informed decision. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated through the graph analysis which demonstrates that the inclusion of informed decision reduces the information dissemination delay remarkably.
Rabia Khan, Amjad Mehmood, Carsten Maple, Kevin Curran · 5 authors
Strategic investment(s) in vehicle automation technologies led to the rapid development of technology that revolutionised transport services and reduced fatalities on a scale never seen before. Technological advancements and their integration in Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) increased uptake and adoption and pushed firmly for the development of highly supportive legal and regulatory and testing environments. However, systemic threats to the security and privacy of technologies and lack of data transparency have created a dynamic threat landscape within which the establishment and verification of security and privacy requirements proved to be an arduous task. In CAVs security and privacy issues can affect the resilience of these systems and hinder the safety of the passengers. Existing research efforts have been placed to investigate the security issues in CAVs and propose solutions across the whole spectrum of cyber resilience. This paper examines the state-of-the-art in security and privacy solutions for CAVs. It investigates their integration challenges, drawbacks and efficiencies when coupled with distributed technologies such as Blockchain. It has also listed different cyber-attacks being investigated while designing security and privacy mechanism for CAVs.
The collaborative path planning and scheduling can overcome the limitations of single vehicle intelligence to obtain a globally optimal decision strategy in cognitive internet of vehicles (CIoVs). The collaboration of vehicles necessitates the exchange of environmental and decision information, generating massive collaborative computing tasks with strict latency requirements. Leveraging mobile edge computing (MEC) technology, computing tasks can be processed near the vehicles to reduce latency. However, traffic congestion and computational load imbalance seriously affect traffic efficiency and computational latency. In hybrid driving scenarios, it is challenging to fulfill the diverse service requirements of vehicles with different intelligence levels. Moreover, non-collaborative tend to result in traffic congestion due to vehicle aggregation effects, while centralized solutions lack flexibility and have high computational complexity. To address these concerns, a distributed multi-agent reinforcement learning (DMARL) algorithm is proposed for collaborative path planning and scheduling in a blockchain-based collaboration framework. In this framework, we model the communication, traffic situation and task processing of the system and formulate a joint optimization problem to minimize both travel time and computation latency. Last, we convert the scheduling problem for different types of vehicles into Markov decision processes (MDPs) and propose Q-learning-based DMARL algorithm to achieve proactive load balancing of both road infrastructures and MEC nodes (MECNs). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the comparison schemes in terms of load balance indexes of roads and MECNs, travel time, and computation latency.
Dec 17, 2023·2023 IEEE International Conferences on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing & Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical & Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData) and IEEE Congress on Cybermatics (Cybermatics)
In recent years, the adoption of blockchain technology has significantly advanced distributed trust and privacy protection, rendering it a popular choice for data sharing scenarios within the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). However, when applied to data sharing contexts, the technology encounters issues related to low throughput and sluggish consensus speed. To address these issues, this paper proposes a novel data sharing scheme tailored for IoV that leverages a sharded blockchain to boost system throughput. The scheme dynamically selects nodes and shards based on vehicle reputation, computing power, and location centrality, ensuring the security of shard verification. Additionally, the scheme incorporates a proxy node selection strategy and utilizes Boneh-Lynn-Shacham (BLS) signature aggregation technology to optimize the Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus mechanism. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with other schemes, the proposed approach achieves superior levels of security, reliability while maintaining lower communication complexity.
Cross-border data privacy protection often involves personal privacy data from different regions, where cross-border vehicle identity authentication requires a large amount of sensitive data. The cross-border movement of this sensitive data poses a significant threat to privacy. A distributed identity management blockchain model for cross-border data privacy protection is proposed to avoid the cross-border transmission of sensitive data through identity authentication. The model combines the SM2 and SM9 algorithms and blockchain technology to guarantee the security of stored data while providing a method to avoid sensitive data crossing borders and realizing cross-border identity authentication. The model was originally designed for the Northbound Travel for Macao scenario but can still be applied to other cross-border authentications. The generation speed of a Non-Fungible Token is verified through experiments, and the generation time and efficiency of Non-Fungible Tokens satisfy the actual needs of Internet of Vehicles authentication.
The burgeoning domain of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), a subset of the Internet of Things (IoT), promises to revolutionize transportation through enhanced safety, efficiency, and environmental sustainability. By amalgamating technologies like sensors and cloud computing, the IoV paves the way for optimized traffic management, heightened vehicle safety, and the birth of novel business paradigms. However, this growth is shadowed by significant security concerns, especially in the communication and payment sectors. Addressing the pressing need for secure Vehicle to Everything (V2X) communications and payments amidst rising cyber threats, this research introduces the Ethereum based Secure Payment and Communication Solution (ESP2CS). Utilizing Ethereum as a middleware, ESP2CS ensures robust and secure V2X interactions. The solution is complemented by an Android Auto application for vehicles, streamlining inter vehicle communication, parking space detection, and transaction management. Furthermore, dedicated Android applications are developed for parking space renters and the parking IoT system. Preliminary evaluations underscore ESP2CS's superior cost effectiveness, integrity and consistency over contemporary solutions, with Ethereum bolstering both security and efficiency.
The advancing fifth-generation technology has brought the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) more and more attention. The vast amount of data collected and generated by vehicles has enabled enhanced driving security and intelligent transportation through data sharing between vehicles and roadside infrastructures. Due to the huge data volume and vehicle resource constraints, vehicular edge networks have been proposed to provide computational and storage resources. Vehicular data commonly contains sensitive information about geographical locations and personal identifiers, making it vulnerable to attacks and leaks. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework for blockchain-enabled data sharing in vehicular edge networks. Attribute-based ring signatures and threshold proxy re-encryption are used to address privacy concerns, and a decentralized regulatory approach has been proposed to track illegal data transfers. We address the security and trust issues by using the consortium blockchain as a distributed ledger of correlated information records. We also implement consent-based access control for data owners, which is rarely considered in currently proposed systems. Implementation and experiments show that our scheme can handle large throughput and data sizes. The security analysis shows the promise of our scheme in ensuring security against various attacks.
The potential of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to reduce on-board system costs in autonomous vehicles through shared intelligence is considerable. However, it still faces significant challenges, including concerns over data breaches and privacy, inefficiencies and limited fault tolerance in centralized management, and the challenge of ensuring data accuracy. This letter marks the inaugural report from a series of IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles (TIV) Trustworthy IoV Workshops, which aim to address these issues. In these workshops, we explore the concept of a decentralized IoV (DeIoV), underpinned by decentralized autonomous organizations and operations (DAOs), to facilitate trustworthy interactions between vehicles and other entities. The proposed DeIoV is structured in two layers: the local DAO layer and the global DAO layer. This dual-layer architecture distinguishes between real-time and non-real-time decision-making tasks, aiding in their efficient completion. To ensure data security, integrity, and accuracy, we employ blockchain technology and smart contracts, which allow for mutual verification among adjacent members and utilize encryption algorithms. A reputation value-based voting mechanism for decision-making is also introduced, which helps prevent the monopolization of power through token-based systems, a common issue in traditional DAOs. Ultimately, we believe that DeIoV has the potential to create a trustworthy IoV ecosystem, contributing significantly to safe, secure, and collaborative autonomous driving.
Juhani Latvakoski, Vesa Kyllönen, Jussi Ronkainen
The novel contribution of this research is decentralised IOTA-based concepts of digital trust for securing remote driving in an urban environment. The conceptual solutions are studied and described, and respective experimental solutions are developed relying on digital identities, public key cryptography with a decentralised approach using decentralised identifiers (DIDs) and verifiable credentials (VCs), and an IOTA-based distributed ledger. The provided digital trust solutions were validated by executing them according to the remote driving scenario but with a simulated vehicle and simulated remote driving system. The hybrid simulation mainly focused on the validation of functional, causal temporal correctness, feasibility, and capabilities of the provided solutions. The evaluations indicate that the concepts of digital trust fulfil the purpose and contribute towards making remote driving more trustable. A supervisory stakeholder was used as a verifier, requiring a set of example verifiable credentials from the vehicle and the remote driver, and accepting them to the security control channel. The separation of control and data planes from each other was found to be a good solution because the delays caused by required security control can be limited to the initiation of the remote driving session without causing additional delays in the actual real-time remote driving control data flow. The application of the IOTA Tangle as the verifiable data registry was found to be sufficient for security control purposes. During the evaluations, the need for further studies related to scalability, application of wallets, dynamic trust situations, time-sensitive behaviour, and autonomous operations, as well as smart contract(s) between multiple stakeholders, were detected. As the next step of this research, the provided digital trust solutions will be integrated with a vehicle, remote driving system and traffic infrastructure for evaluation of the performance, reliability, scalability, and flexibility in real-world experiments of remote driving of an electric bus in an urban environment.
Many IoT applications require users to share their devices’ location, and enhanced privacy-protection means sharing location anonymously, unlinkably and without relying on any administrators. But under such protection, it is difficult to trust shared location data, which may be from unregistered devices or from the same one’s multiple logins or from the cloned device ID, even be generated by an attacker without any devices! Such untrusted location sharing cheats system, misleads users, even attacks system. To the best of our knowledge, such problems have not been solved in a decentralized system. To solve them in one scheme, we put forward the first decentralized accumulator for device registration and construct the first practical decentralized anonymous authentication for device login. When logging in, the device provides a special knowledge proof, which integrates zero-knowledge (for privacy) with knowledge-leakage (for identifying abnormal behaviors) designing for blockchain (for decentralization). Therefore, in our system, only registered IoT devices can upload location data and their logins are anonymous and unlinkable, while login exceeding${K}$times in a system period or cloning ID to login concurrently can be identified and tracked without any trusted centers. In addition, we provide the security proofs and the application examples of the proposed scheme. And the efficiency analysis and experimental data show that the performance of our scheme can meet the needs of real-world location sharing on IoT.
Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a prominent technology in the drive towards establishing smart transportation systems in the Digital Transformation (DX) era. These networks provide users with critical road information for optimal route selection and accident avoidance. However, the openness of VANETs environment makes them susceptible to various cyber threats. Therefore, authenticating the entities that join the network is necessary and crucial for ensuring the security and integrity of VANET communications. Kerberos is one of the authentication protocols that ensure security, as the password and key are never directly sent among the entities. However, ensuring secure and efficient authentication, especially in VANET handovers, remains a challenge. This paper introduces an innovative authentication system for VANETs that leverages the combined power of blockchain and Kerberos. The system stores Kerberos authenticator messages in a distributed ledger within the blockchain, accessible to Trusted Authorities (TAS) and all RSUs. This approach streamlines vehicle handovers and safeguards authenticator messages against adversarial tampering. It exhibits minimal signalling overhead and authentication delay, ensuring swift and secure authentication processes. We verify the proposal’s effectiveness by simulating the VANETs environment with 100 vehicles, 4 RSUs, and 1 TAS using Omnet++ with the Tsushima, Japan area map.
Kiseok Kim, Sangmin Lee, Taehoon Yoo, Hwangnam Kim
In performing various missions using various types of vehicles or other moving objects, the positioning of each agent within the swarm is essential. In particular, for missions that require precise location estimation, the case of malicious attacks through data forgery cannot be excluded. In this paper, we propose a highly secure and accurate localization framework utilizing a Directed-Acyclic-Graph (DAG)-based distributed ledger as an intelligent vehicle network for an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) positioning system. When performing UWB positioning, the data generated from each node are used to calculate the Time of Flight (ToF), and if any of them are tampered with, the overall positioning performance is greatly reduced. We prevented positioning performance degradation by ensuring the safety and integrity of the data by applying a chain-based logical network between each node utilized for UWB positioning. The experimental results indicated that the proposed framework was effective at providing system stability and security without affecting the UWB positioning performance. In addition, the performance of the framework was verified by presenting defense indicators for various attack scenarios.
The location information of cars contains great value, but the uncontrollable characteristics of public data and the difficulty in distributing benefits derived from the potential value of the data greatly reduces the enthusiasm for data owners to share their data. In addition, the current selective disclosure schemes based on merkle tree still require large costs when there are many data items. To solve these problems, a blockchain-based framework for sharing cars’ location information applicable to the online car hailing industry is proposed in this paper, enabling the sharing of cars’ location information while protecting passengers’ privacy through selective disclosure. The combination of homomorphic encryption and probabilistic verification enables a faster batch data verification compared to other blockchain-based data sharing schemes, as well as ensures the authenticity of the data uploaded to the blockchain. The experimental results show that the proposed selective disclosure mechanism based on hash exclusive or tree has lower costs than the baseline for cases with many data items. Moreover, the proposed framework meets both security and feasibility requirements. Specifically speaking, under the constraint of 128-bits security level, the costs of time and space on the location information during one drive are at microsecond level and kilobyte level, respectively. Finally, the scheme is suitable for scenarios with higher throughput.
The rapid increase in vehicle traffic volume in modern societies has raised the need to develop innovative solutions to reduce traffic congestion and enhance traffic management efficiency. Revolutionary advanced technology, such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), enables improved traffic management, helps eliminate congestion, and supports a safer environment. ITS provides real-time information on vehicle traffic and transportation systems that can improve decision-making for road users. However, ITS suffers from routing issues at the network layer when utilising Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). This is because each vehicle plays the role of a router in this network, which leads to a complex vehicle communication network, causing issues such as repeated link breakages between vehicles resulting from the mobility of the network and rapid topological variation. This may lead to loss or delay in packet transmissions; this weakness can be exploited in routing attacks, such as black-hole and gray-hole attacks, that threaten the availability of ITS services. In this paper, a Blockchain-based smart contracts model is proposed to offer convenient and comprehensive security mechanisms, enhancing the trustworthiness between vehicles. Self-Classification Blockchain-Based Contracts (SCBC) and Voting-Classification Blockchain-Based Contracts (VCBC) are utilised in the proposed protocol. The results show that VCBC succeeds in attaining better results in PDR and TP performance even in the presence of Blackhole and Grayhole attacks.
Real-time and interactive traffic information sharing systems are crucial in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) as they enable vehicles to make informed decisions, thereby improving the efficiency of intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Message authentication ensures the accuracy, integrity, and tamper-resistance of information in IoV. Existing schemes aim to achieve time-critical message authentication . However, these schemes are time-consuming and cannot meet the real-time requirements of IoV. Additionally, there are issues with latency in data synchronization and data redundancy when vehicles traverse different domains. We propose an efficient, distributed, and resistant-to-malicious-attacks authentication scheme based on the reputation mechanism. Our scheme supports batch verification, enabling fast authentication. By leveraging the decentralized and ledger-synchronized features of blockchain , our distributed scheme reduces data redundancy. We also employ a reputation mechanism to ensure reliable reports in IoVs. We experimentally confirm that our scheme outperforms EADA (59.73%), RCoM (76.35%), MLGSDT (63.36%), and TRAJ (82.08%). This approach provides a secure and reliable solution for report authentication.
The notion of an intelligent transportation system (ITS) aims to boost the performance of transportation networks, which has gained more and more traction in both academic and commercial circles. ITS is a constantly evolving vision that combines cutting-edge transportation approaches with new information, communication, computers, and other technology. ITS should discover consequence routes to enhance the sustainability, safety, and trustworthiness of the entire transportation system utilizing emerging technologies. In this paper, a sustainable safety management framework for connected vehicles is proposed by integrating blockchain. It introduces smart transportation equipment called an AI-enabled vehicle smart device (AVSD) for vehicular communications. AVSD can reduce energy consumption by decreasing the computational costs in vehicular communications. Smart contracts are used to identify vehicles automatically and establish secure communication among vehicles and emergency service stations (ESSs) like hospitals, police stations, and fire stations. The experiment results show that the proposed framework provides a communication environment for sustainable safety and security using the introduced smart transportation device. The proposed blockchain-enabled sustainable safety management framework has the potential to improve safety and sustainability in the transportation industry by creating a secure, decentralized, and transparent platform for managing safety data and promoting safe and sustainable driving behaviors.