Blockchain Papers

Jamile Khalili Shahrouz, Morteza Analoui

No abstract is available for this record.

Shuangshuang Han, Yongqiang Bai, Yueyun Chen, Chintha Tellambura

The current Internet of Vehicles (IoV) data are facing challenges such as data silos, security and privacy concerns, data quality issues, and collaboration barriers. This paper proposes an IoV Information Management System (IIMS) based on parallel intelligence and blockchain to address these challenges. By leveraging the decentralized, immutable, and traceable nature of blockchain, combined with the incentive mechanisms and collaborative models of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), a secure and trustworthy data sharing platform is established for collaborative analysis, business cooperation, and innovative applications of IoV data. The proposed approach utilizes the decentralized nature and data backup capabilities of blockchain to mitigate the single point of failure issues associated with centralized servers. Additionally, the anonymity, immutability, and traceability features of blockchain ensure the privacy, security, and integrity of data sharing. Moreover, the incentive mechanisms and DAO solutions within the blockchain promote data sharing among vehicles while ensuring data quality.

Karolina Bak, Hannes Salin, Karol Niczyj, Łukasz Krzywiecki

In this study, we explore the potential of integrating blockchain technology and cryptographic primitives such as Schnorr signatures and Pedersen commitments, via a Stamp and Extend scheme, in order to develop a trusted and reliable timestamping system. Our proposed architecture aims to facilitate the safe and reliable platooning of dangerous goods vehicles in C-ITS enabled tunnels. We have implemented a proof-of-concept on the Ethereum platform, demonstrating the feasibility and survivability of our proposed architecture. A series of performance experiments further underscore the potential of our system, reinforcing its value in fostering secure and trusted coordination of dangerous goods transport in connected vehicle tunnels.

Douglas L. L. Moura, André L. L. Aquino, Antônio A. F. Loureiro

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) involve integrating information and communication technologies with traffic infrastructure and vehicles to support the development of more sustainable transportation systems. However, ITS face security, reliability, and efficiency challenges in storage and sharing real-time critical data. To address these issues, we propose an architecture based on edge computing and blockchain to enable secure data storage and sharing for ITS. By leveraging edge computing capabilities and blockchain's distributed ledger technology, our architecture enhances data security, ensures data integrity, and improves real-time data processing in ITS. We analyze a smart parking system application scenario, and the results demonstrate a significant reduction in average latency and storage usage, highlighting the positive impact of our solution on enhancing the overall performance and reliability of ITS.

Boqian Ma, Vir Nath Pathak, Lanping Liu, Sushmita Ruj

A sparse Merkle tree is a Merkle tree with fixed height and indexed leaves given by a map from indices to leaf values. It allows for both efficient membership and non-membership proofs. It has been widely used as an authenticated data structure in various applications, such as layer-2 rollups for blockchains. zkSync Lite, a popular Ethereum layer-2 rollup solution, uses a sparse Merkle tree to represent the state of the layer-2 blockchain. The account information is recorded in the leaves of the tree. In this paper, we study the sparse Merkle tree algorithms presented in zkSync Lite, and propose an efficient batch update algorithm to calculate a new root hash given a list of account (leaf) operations. Using the construction in zkSync Lite as a benchmark, our algorithm 1) improves the account update time from $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ to $\mathcal{O}(1)$ and 2) reduces the batch update cost by half using a one-pass traversal. Empirical analysis of real-world block data shows that our algorithm outperforms the benchmark by at most 14%.

Xueming Si, Min Li, Zhongyuan Yao, Weihua Zhu · 6 authors

Conventional blockchain consensus protocols tailored for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) usually face low transaction throughput, high latency, and elevated communication overhead issues. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose ESBCP, an efficient and secure blockchain consensus protocol for the IoV environment. Firstly, considering the significant performance differences among nodes in the IoV, we designed a blockchain consensus model for the IoV. Roadside units execute a trust evaluation mechanism to select high-quality vehicle nodes for the consensus process, thereby reducing the likelihood of malicious nodes in the consensus cluster. Secondly, we designed a node partition strategy to adapt to the dynamic feature of the IoV. Finally, addressing the mobility of nodes in the IoV, we introduced a dynamic unique node list. Vehicle nodes can promptly select nodes with high reliability from the list of communicable nodes to join their unique node list, while also promptly removing nodes with low reliability from their unique node list. Combining these strategies, we propose DK-PBFT, an improved Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm. The algorithm meets the efficiency and mobility requirements of vehicular networks. Through theoretical analysis, ESBCP could prevent external and internal security risks while reducing communication overhead. Experimental verification demonstrated that ESBCP effectively reduces consensus latency and improves transaction throughput. Our proposed ESBCP can be used in other application scenarios that require high consensus efficiency.

Sandip Roy, Sourav Nandi, Raj Maheshwari, Sachin Shetty · 6 authors

Recent advances in Internet technology and IoT devices have facilitated researchers to foster a wide range of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that improve the quality of automated transportation by addressing real-time safety and traffic management issues. The participating ITS agents, such as smart cars and roadside equipment, are required to communicate urgently through an open (unsecured) wireless channel in an unattended setting. To address the security issues, several vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) authentication and access control protocols have been proposed in recent times. However, fast-moving vehicles need to set up frequent authentication with different roadside units, which induces high computation and communication overheads. Consequently, it becomes a bottleneck for the resource-limited vehicle onboard unit devices. As the blockchain supports decentralized storage with data integrity and transparency, in this article, we design a secure and lightweight Internet of Vehicles (IoV)-enabled blockchain-based access control protocol with a handover authentication facility (we call it BACHP-IoV, in short). The handover authentication mechanism exploits no computation-costly cryptographic primitives. Once the transactions or messages have been securely gathered by a roadside unit (RSU),$RSU_{j}$, residing in a group of vehicles$Vh_{i}$, will form a partial block, which is later forwarded to a cloud server node in the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cloud servers blockchain network for converting it into a full block. Next, the full blocks are mined using a voting-based consensus algorithm. In addition, the in-charge trusted authority$\mathcal {TA}$uploads information about the registered vehicles, such as randomized masked passwords and random secrets, to the blockchain. Thus, an$RSU_{j}$can check the authenticity of a particular vehicle as well. We prove the security strength of the proposed BACHP-IoV by using the well-known Real-or-Random (ROR)-based random oracle model, the ProVerif 2.03 simulation tool, and informal security analysis. We have implemented the proposed BACHP-IoV through network simulator 3 (NS-3) and blockchain, and the simulation results demonstrate that BACHP-IoV is practical in a real-life scenario. A detailed comparative analysis also shows that BACHP-IoV provides significantly better security and efficiency than the existing competing schemes.

Weizheng Wang, Zhaoyang Han, Thippa Reddy Gadekallu, Saleem Raza · 6 authors

With the rapid increase of data from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the security and privacy of data presents a severe challenge for UAV-based applications. Moreover, UAVs with constrained resources cannot be equipped with strong but complicated cryptographic primitives for authentication protocol design. Although some attempts have been made to deal with security and privacy issues for UAVs, most of the existing studies have been found numerous security vulnerabilities or own extreme communication/computation overheads. This article offers a lightweight and practical mutual authentication protocol solely comprised of bitwise XOR operations and one-way hash functions. Moreover, blockchain technology is utilized to alleviate the centralized trusted party (TA) issue. Then, security of our proposed authentication protocol is proved by widely adopted formal security proof—Real-or-Random model and informal security proof. The experimental results prove that the proposed protocol can achieve better security requirements (e.g., decentralized TA, replay attack defense, and session key security) with less communication cost (i.e., reduced by around 58.7% at most) and computation cost (i.e., reduced by around 98.9% at most) than related UAV authentication schemes.

Sanjeev Kumar Dwivedi, Ruhul Amin, Satyanarayana Vollala, Ashok Kumar Das

The intelligent vehicles collect and distribute the data to other vehicles and Roadside Units (RSU), which ultimately strengthens the vehicular services in the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET). In order to protect against a variety of potential security threats, the VANET system needs a proper authentication mechanism, which requires more computational overheads and cannot perform better, when a cluster of vehicles sends the messages simultaneously. This paper aims to design a decentralized blockchain-based batch authentication protocol using Elliptic Curve Cryptography, where RSU authenticates the group of vehicles together. Moreover. our protocol also supports the verification of both individual messages (signature) generated by the vehicle and batch signature. We have used the Scyther security tool to verify our protocol and found that the protocol is safe and secure. A detailed comparative analysis reveals that the proposed scheme achieves more functionality and security compared to relevant schemes. The security analysis confirms that the proposed scheme is secure against all applicable attacks. Moreover, the ethereum platform simulates the proposed scheme, showing its effectiveness and confirming that it is feasible to deploy and execute transactions in real networks.

Zihan Zhou, Chenxiao Guo, Hao Xu, Xiaoshuai Zhang · 6 authors

To enhance security and confidentiality in P2P communication, we implement a blockchain-enabled system of identity management and mutual authentication protocol, Be-Mutual. It provides user-centric identity management based on blockchain addresses and employs mutual authentication based on asymmetric encryption to prevent unauthorized access. We address the complexity of blockchain addresses, a significant chal-lenge in real-world applications such as Decentralized Physical Infrastructure (DePIN) and Decentralized Wireless (DeWi), by integrating the Blockchain-enabled Domain Name System (Be-DNS) into BeMutual. BeDNS maps complex blockchain addresses to easy-to-remember domain names, improving user experience without sacrificing security. The proposed BeMutual system, combining blockchain-based identity management, mutual authentication, and domain name resolution, offers a pioneering solution for secure and user-friendly P2P communication in decentralized environments.

Shincheol Lee, Ji Sun Shin

In smart farming, information and communication technologies such as IoT are driving the agricultural industry towards improved efficiency and productivity while reducing human intervention. As agricultural systems become increasingly connected to the Internet, they provide many new opportunities but also introduce new challenges. Connecting such systems to a network exposes them to cyberattacks and vulnerabilities; therefore, security and privacy are important challenges that should be addressed. Specifically, because of the distinct characteristics of smart farming such as environmental and farm conditions, security solutions suitable for smart farming are indispensable. In this paper, we propose a location verification (LV) protocol as a security solution for autonomous and intelligent moving devices such as drones and robots deployed in smart farming. Moreover, as an application of the proposed LV protocol, we propose a blockchain-based secure drone rental mechanism for smart farming. We present a security analysis in which the proposed LV protocol and rental mechanism are secure against man-in-the-middle, impersonation, modification, replay, and relay attacks, with the rental mechanism providing mutual authentication. Through a performance evaluation of the LV protocol in terms of the communication overhead, computation cost, and storage cost and a performance evaluation of the blockchain for drone rental with regard to throughput and latency, we confirm the feasibility and efficiency of the LV protocol and drone rental mechanism in the smart farming.

Muhammad Asad, Saima Shaukat, Ehsan Javanmardi, Jin Nakazato · 6 authors

The rapid increase in the number of connected vehicles on roads has made vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) an attractive target for malicious actors. As a result, VANETs require secure data transmission to maintain the network’s integrity. Federated learning (FL) has been proposed as a secure data-sharing method for VANETs, but it is limited in its ability to protect sensitive data. This article proposes integrating Blockchain technology into FL to provide an additional layer of security for VANETs. In particular, we propose a secure and efficient blockchain-based FL (SEBFL) approach to ensure communication efficiency and data privacy in VANETs. To this end, we use the FL model for VANETs, where computation tasks are decomposed from a base station to individual vehicles. This effectively reduces the congestion delay and communication overhead. Integrating blockchain with the FL model provides a reliable and secure data communication system between vehicles, roadside units, and a cloud server. Additionally, we use a homomorphic encryption system (HES) that effectively preserves the confidentiality and credibility of vehicles. Besides, the proposed SEBFL leverages the asynchronous FL model, minimizing the long delay while avoiding possible threats and attacks using HES. The experimental results show that the proposed SEBFL achieves 0.87% accuracy while a model inversion attack and 0.86% accuracy while a membership inference attack.

Alexander Keith, Thanigajan Sangarapillai, Abdulaziz Almehmadi, Khalil El‐Khatib

The increasing popularity and usage of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has brought about new challenges in airspace management. With the number of drones expected to grow even further in the coming years, there is an urgent need for an autonomous traffic management system (TMS) that can safely and effectively manage drone traffic in the airspace. It is critical that this TMS be built with principles of the Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) triad. In this paper, a traffic management system for UAVs is presented that takes advantage of a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. The TMS provides a decentralized and secure method to manage and deconflict drone flight paths, allowing for safe navigation in crowded airspaces. Through a series of simulated experiments, we demonstrated the system’s capabilities in handling path creation, multiple conflict resolutions, and large numbers of drones. Simulated tests showed that the proposed system was able to handle deconfliction of 1000 drones inside of a one square kilometer, and returned calculated paths for drones in 60 to 2000 ms with up to 100 deconflictions. The Hyperledger Fabric powered traffic management system showcased the potential to leverage permissioned blockchain technology in improving drone traffic management.

Manjunath Ramanna Lamani, P. Julian Benadit, Krishnakumar Vaithinathan, Latha Parthiban

No abstract is available for this record.

Sudha Anbalagan, Gunasekaran Raja, Sugeerthi Gurumoorthy, Deepak Suresh Rajendran · 5 authors

Industry 5.0 integrates human ability with machines to satisfy the increasing demands of automation. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) are vital in Industry 5.0 due to their high mobility and intelligent decision-making. Data collected from AVs using Road Side Units (RSUs) aid in enhanced delivery, automated ride-sharing and minimized latency travel. The AVs are reticent to exchange information with other vehicles to ensure data privacy. As there is no trusted environment for data exchange, the AV data are vulnerable to cyber infiltration due to the widespread use of software and the activation of wireless connections. Identifying the source of data that has been shared without authorization is challenging. In this paper, we exploit Machine Learning (ML) with an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) that incorporates Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) for detecting intrusions in assistance with blockchain for an enhanced trust evaluation in a 5G-V2X Internet of Vehicles (IoV) environment. A detailed analysis demonstrates that the proposed Blockchain assisted IDS (BIDS) is efficient and secures 98% accuracy compared with the other state-of-the-art solutions.

Junhui Zhao, Fanwei Huang, Longxia Liao, Qingmiao Zhang

Although vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) significantly enhance traffic convenience, the propagation of erroneous information by malicious vehicles remains a challenging issue. To maintain message reliability, it is crucial to establish a trust management model that can promptly detect malicious vehicles and identify false messages. This article presents a novel trust management model based on blockchain, machine learning, and active detection technology. In the proposed model, we designed a trust evaluation scheme to evaluate the credibility by calculating the direct and indirect trust of the vehicle. To achieve this goal, we use active detection technology to detect indirect trust in vehicles, and then store it in the blockchain. The direct trust of the vehicle is calculated using a Bayesian classifier. The use of active detection technology speeds up the process of filtering out malicious vehicles. Machine learning technology simplifies the complex iterations involved in computing the trust value. Finally, the use of blockchain ensures the consistency and tamper-proofing of the trusted data. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that our approach outperforms the present trust management models.

Gauhar Ali, Mohammed ElAffendi, Naveed Ahmad

Intelligent Transport System (ITS) offers inter-vehicle communication, safe driving, road condition updates, and intelligent traffic management. This research intends to propose a novel decentralized "BlockAuth" architecture for vehicles, authentication, and authorization, traveling across the border. It is required because the existing architects rely on a single Trusted Authority (TA) for issuing certifications, which can jeopardize privacy and system integrity. Similarly, the centralized TA, if failed, can cause the whole system to collapse. Furthermore, a unique "Proof of Authenticity and Integrity" process is proposed, redirecting drivers/vehicles to their home country for authentication, ensuring the security of their credentials. Implemented with Hyperledger Fabric, BlockAuth ensures secure vehicle authentication and authorization with minimal computational overhead, under 2%. Furthermore, it opens up global access, enforces the principles of separation of duty and least privilege, and reinforces resilience via decentralization and automation.

Chen Zhao, Xiao Wang, Yisheng Lv, Yonglin Tian · 6 authors

Rapid development of AI technologies has propelled the seamless integration of physical and cyber worlds with various kinds of online/offline information collected from millions of multimodal sensing systems. The complexity, diversity and uncertainty inherited in such systems, such as Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs), have gone far beyond human capacity of managing and controlling. Our team is among the first to propose the idea of utilizing the nearly unlimited computational resources in cyberspace to construct a bottom-up and top-down combined artificial ITSs for testing, experimenting, representation, verification, and validation of physical ITSs. Especially, the parallel transportation has been developed for safer, smarter, greener, and more reliable transportation services. After three decades of research and field studies, the DeCAST in Transverse, i.e., Decentralized/Distributed Autonomous Operations/Organizations (DAO) in transportation systems, has been envisioned. In this paper, we introduce its architecture, operational processes, software and hardware platforms, and real world applications. Specifically, a transportation foundation model driven by artificial transportation systems, parallel learning and federated intelligence, named TengYun, is outlined for DeCAST.

Min Hao, Beihai Tan, Siming Wang, Rong Yu · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Kiran Bala, Ramakant Upadhyay, Syed Rashid Anwar, G. Shrimal

Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) heavily relies on the unique mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) known as the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET). The convenience that the Location Based Service (LBS), security issues arising from VANETs' great portability. Among the most widely used privacy-preserving techniques, distributed k-anonymity does not consider users' reliability, which results in hostile vehicle tracking. Therefore, Blockchain-enabled, Trust and Location dependent-Privacy Preserving (BTLB-PP) authentication system in VANET to overcome issues. Trust Management (TM) based on Dirichlet distribution, client and member will only collaborate with vehicles they confide by explicitly examining various prerequisites of claimed vehicle and collaborative vehicle during construction of unidentified obfuscation region and integrating attributes of these two functions. Using blockchain, a data structure has been proposed to promptly register trust of vehicles on publicly available blocks, allowing any vehicle to retrieve. In the trials, tests on various datasets have been run. Suggested system is resistant to multiple trust model threats, improving the security of vehicles' confidentiality and privacy. The performance evaluation metrics are precision, recall, f-measure and false positive rate (FPR) are used to evaluate the proposed system. Results from the simulation show that the proposed method is efficient and practical in reality. The suggested method was tested in a simulated traffic situation to verify its effectiveness.

Righa Tandon, Ajay Verma, P. K. Gupta

No abstract is available for this record.

Yang Liu, Debiao He, Min Luo, Huaqun Wang · 5 authors

With the number of smart vehicle drivers increasing rapidly, privacy-preserving identity management methods in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) become more imperative and receive much attention from researchers. Since identity leakage or a single point of failure may result in serious consequences in the VANET, the decentralized anonymous credential (DAC) could be a potential approach to construct a robust network. However, the supervision under decentrilized environment could be a necessary and troublesome in the VANETs. In this paper, we present an anonymous traceable and revocable credential system using blockchain, called ATRC, built over a generalized group signature. The underlying group signature not only meets the anonymity requirement but also makes the users master their identities. What's more, to tackle the privacy leakage in the revocation process, we employ the Merkle tree to construct a whitelist, which trades off the efficiency and the privacy. Finally, we gives the comparison and experiment performance to show our scheme holds lightweight on the user side and has fewer computation costs in the show and revocation phase.

Nilesh Kumar Jadav, Tejal Rathod, Rajesh Gupta, Sudeep Tanwar · 9 authors

The modern warfare scenario has immense challenges that can risk personnel's lives, highlighting the need for data acquisition to win a military operation successfully. In this context, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play a significant role by covertly acquiring reconnaissance data from an enemy location to make the friendly troops aware. The acquired data is mission-critical and needs to be secured from the intruders, which can implicitly manipulate it for their benefit. Moreover, UAVs collect a large amount of data, including high-definition images and surveillance videos; handling such a massive amount of data is a bottleneck on traditional communication networks. To mitigate these issues, this article proposes a blockchain and machine learning (ML)-based secure and intelligent UAV communication underlying sixth-generation (6G) networks, that is, Block-USB. The proposed system refrain the disclosure of highly-sensitive military operations from intruders (either a rogue UAV or a malicious controller). The proposed system uses off-chain storage, that is, Interplanetary file system (IPFS), to improve the blockchain storage capacity. We also present a case study on securing UAV-based military operations by considering multiple scenarios considering controller/UAV malicious. The performance of the proposed system outperforms the traditional baseline 4G/5G and non IPFS-based systems in terms of classification accuracy, communication latency, and data scalability.

Suman Saurabh, Suryanshu Raghav, Sachin Gupta, Mohd Najim

New and advanced technologies have introduced amazing areas like the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) etc. With these new emerging technologies and the open nature of these technologies security and privacy are always a serious concern. The enhancement of IoV brought unmanned cars where data security, privacy, physical attack, and getting stolen are always prime concerns. As reported in the literature, we had lost billions of dollars because of stolen cars and cyber-attacks. To avoid these attacks, we have suggested the Blockchain concept to secure IoV. In this era of data and trust where the internet is flooded with information and where we don't even know how our information can be used, data security and confidentiality should be a must. To solve this problem Blockchain comes into the picture with the concept of a decentralized, distributed ledger that stores the records of ownership of digital assets. Any data stored on the blockchain cannot be modified. It is client-client-based technology where data is decentralized in a way that changes in one node will need the permissions of another node. It uses a hash algorithm where the next node has a record of the previous node's state in the hash function. Using this decentralized, distributed ledger or client-client model of blockchain, we will secure our IoV, where we will see how we can secure our confidential data from any cyberattack and physical attack which will try to breach our security levels. We will use different levels of security modes if there are any security breaches or accidents, vehicles will soon send alert warning messages with the location and current state of vehicles to each of its stakeholders and police station.