The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarm is widely applied in many fields, such as disaster relief and geological exploration. However, it is highly vulnerable when facing an attack from internal malicious UAVs due to the underlying disconnected, intermittent, and limited (DIL) network environment. Recently, building trusted networks has been considered as a strategy to address security issues. Nevertheless, deploying a trusted network in a swarm faces many challenges imposed by the dynamic topology and limited resources of DIL networks. In order to overcome these challenges, we developed a blockchain-based UAV trusted self-organizing networking mechanism (BC-UTSON) to enhance internal security. Three key technologies are proposed for assisting BC-UTSON in achieving trustworthiness. UAV practical Byzantine fault tolerance (U-PBFT) is proposed to guarantee the lightweight consensus and real-time full-node trustworthiness evaluation under the hierarchical self-organizing networking structure of a UAV swarm. A blockchain-based multiweighted subjective logic (BMWSL) scheme has been designed to identify malicious UAV nodes based on the trustworthiness evaluation, which also assists the trusted path quality-aware dynamic routing (TPDR) mechanism to prevent data from routing through malicious nodes. The experimental results show that the proposed BC-UTSON performs much better than nonblockchain-based mechanisms for the UAV swarm.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become a remarkable vehicular communication network for exchanging information between vehicles and other infrastructures. It plays a significant role in the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) by improving vehicle safety and traffic efficiency. However, trust management in IoV suffers in existing systems, even utilizing blockchain. Blockchain is a decentralized and secure technology that improves the security and privacy of incorporating applications. Many researchers proposed various blockchain-enabled IoV applications to enhance trust in the IoV network. But these suffer from vehicle safety, secure authentication mechanism, and higher computational cost. This paper presents a review of existing Blockchain-enabled IoV systems and analyzes them. Therefore, a blockchain-enabled IoV framework has been proposed to increase the trust among all connected nodes in the blockchain network. A 3-step authentication algorithm has been presented to enhance trust management in the IoV system. The proposed framework can establish secure communication among all connected entities. The implementation of the proposed framework assures the trustworthiness of the IoV network.
With the rapid development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), vehicle networks will generate large amounts of data. Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) data sharing can improve driving experience and quality of service, and Vehicle-to-Roadside unit (V2R) communication can improve road transport efficiency. A certain amount of bandwidth is consumed in the process of data sharing between V2V and V2R, and when multiple vehicles request data from the RSU at the same time, there may be network delay or congestion. Therefore, the vehicle obtains data faster by requesting high bandwidth from the RSU. However, since the bandwidth resources of RSUs are limited, optimal bandwidth service strategies need to be investigated. In addition, in order to ensure the safety, efficiency and traceability of data sharing between V2V and V2R, a blockchain-supported IoV needs to be established. Therefore, we design a blockchain-based framework for V2V and V2R transaction framework that integrates DAG blockchain and modern cryptography. The framework ensures security and scalability during the execution of data exchange and completion of bandwidth transactions, improves the service quality of vehicles and realizes decentralized payment. In this work, a two-stage Stackelberg game is established under two pricing schemes of uniform pricing and discriminatory pricing to jointly maximize the benefits of vehicles and RSUs. In Stage I, the RSU sets the corresponding bandwidth service and pricing strategy. In Stage II, the vehicle decides the service demand according to the observed pricing strategy. The optimal bandwidth allocation and pricing strategy between the RSU and the vehicle is determined through the game of both parties, and the existence and uniqueness of the two-stage subgame Nash equilibrium is analyzed by applying backward induction. The correctness of the model is verified by experiments, and the comparative analysis shows that the proposed model has high throughput.
Electric vehicles (EVs) have rapidly developed over the last decade due to their environmental benefits. As a key component of EVs, electric vehicle chargers are becoming increasingly digital and intelligent. However, due to the vast attack surface and the lack of systematic study, EV chargers and charging management cloud platforms are facing cyber security problems. These problems include weak cryptographic mechanisms, insecure data communication, and malicious firmware attacks. Through specific vulnerabilities, attackers can tamper with the data communication or replay network requests between EV chargers and cloud platforms. It will cause threats such as user-level privacy leakage, power fluctuations in the smart grid, and damage to Electric vehicles, damaging public life and property safety. Given the above, this paper proposes a security protection scheme incorporating blockchain, zero trust, and ShangMi cryptographic (SM) algorithms. The scheme uses Hyperledger Fabric for key management and trust evaluation event storage to guarantee the authenticity, non-repudiation, and tamper-proof of keys and events. In addition, zero trust is applied to secure valuable resources and enforce identity and access management (IAM) for accessing entities. We adopt the dynamic trust evaluation method to assess the trustworthiness of accessing entities in real time to implement dynamic authorization. Furthermore, the SM algorithms SM2, SM3, and SM4 are used to protect data confidentiality, integrity, and authenticity. Experimental results demonstrate that our scheme can effectively resist replay and tampering attacks, securing data communication between EV chargers and cloud platforms. And the performance of the cryptographic algorithm, blockchain system, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) meets Chinese national and industry standards.
We demonstrate how to leverage Apple's Find My protocol, most well known as the underlying protocol of the AirTag, for arbitrary data-muling and location services. This provides a new "infrastructure-free" deployment, where areas with frequent human activity can take advantage of this zero-cost backhaul network. While there are severe limitations (e.g. no acknowledgement channel back to the sending device), Find My-based networking could still be a reliable backhaul with sufficient transmission redundancy and knowledge of deployment context. Towards that end, we develop TagAlong, a protocol for scalable, efficient data transmission on the Find My network. We implement a proof-of-concept and demonstrate throughput up to 12.5 bytes/sec and up to a 97% data reception rate.
Rabia Khan, Amjad Mehmood, Zeeshan Iqbal, Carsten Maple · 5 authors
Security has been the most widely researched topic, particularly within IoT, and has been considered as the major hurdle in the adoption of different applications of IoT. When it comes to IoV, security is considered as the most inevitable component to ensure a safe and smooth driving experience. CAV is the new era of transportation, integrating intelligence and self-driving capabilities within vehicles and that requires strong security measures to ensure safety. Security alone is not enough. Instead, a complete package including privacy of the vehicles and passengers needs to be added in addition to secure communication. This is because CAVs are under continuous cyber threats and attacks and the most important among them is the DDoS, where a remote attacker can hijack/launch attacks on vehicles remotely. Single point of failure attacks target the centralized trusted body in order to mislead the connected vehicles for personal gains. In this paper, the authors have proposed a secure communication system for CAVs using blockchain, which also ensures the privacy of the vehicle/people. The paper highlights the major components of the proposed system, and its performance is evaluated to check its efficiency against DDoS and Eclipse attacks. The unlinkability and anonymity of the vehicles have been ensured using the zk-SNAKR protocol over Blockchain.
Anand Singh Rajawat, S. B. Goyal, Pradeep Bedi, Chaman Verma · 6 authors
The physical world can be controlled directly over the Internet once a Cyber-Physical 1 System (CPS) infrastructure is established. The Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) encompasses Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), and 5G-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) solutions to transform traditional transportation into an ITS. This research investigates the option of running a blockchain-driven security assurance model to safeguard intelligent roads and smart vehicles as part of ITS. The proposed model considers a semi-distributed model in blockchain deployment to ensure satisfactory Internet of Vehicles (IoV) service while mining acceptable security assurance. The experimental outcomes on intelligent roads and smart parking management indicate that the proposed model achieves comparably good data delivery and reduced latency, paving the way to an innovative deployment of blockchain technologies in IoV for a dependable and trustworthy ITS.
Asif Ali Laghari, Abdullah Ayub Khan, Reem Alkanhel, Hela Elmannai · 5 authors
The vast enhancement in the development of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is due to the impact of the distributed emerging technology and topology of the industrial IoV. It has created a new paradigm, such as the security-related resource constraints of Industry 5.0. A new revolution and dimension in the IoV popup raise various critical challenges in the existing information preservation, especially in node transactions and communication, transmission, trust and privacy, and security-protection-related problems, which have been analyzed. These aspects pose serious problems for the industry to provide vehicular-related data integrity, availability, information exchange reliability, provenance, and trustworthiness for the overall activities and service delivery prospects against the increasing number of multiple transactions. In addition, there has been a lot of research interest that intersects with blockchain and Internet of Vehicles association. In this regard, the inadequate performance of the Internet of Vehicles and connected nodes and the high resource requirements of the consortium blockchain ledger have not yet been tackled with a complete solution. The introduction of the NuCypher Re-encryption infrastructure, hashing tree and allocation, and blockchain proof-of-work require more computational power as well. This paper contributes in two different folds. First, it proposes a blockchain sawtooth-enabled modular architecture for protected, secure, and trusted execution, service delivery, and acknowledgment with immutable ledger storage and security and peer-to-peer (P2P) network on-chain and off-chain inter-communication for vehicular activities. Secondly, we design and create a smart contract-enabled data structure in order to provide smooth industrial node streamlined transactions and broadcast content. Substantially, we develop and deploy a hyperledger sawtooth-aware customized consensus for multiple proof-of-work investigations. For validation purposes, we simulate the exchange of information and related details between connected devices on the IoV. The simulation results show that the proposed architecture of BIoV reduces the cost of computational power down to 37.21% and the robust node generation and exchange up to 56.33%. Therefore, only 41.93% and 47.31% of the Internet of Vehicles-related resources and network constraints are kept and used, respectively.
Empowered by 5G communication technology, high-speed information exchange can be realized on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) for intelligent transportation applications. Since most applications require vehicles to report perceived information to nearby base stations, how to defend against malicious attacks and selfish behaviors of vehicles in reporting activities has become an essential security issue. Some researchers have attempted to encourage vehicles to actively report information by establishing reputations for them, but these efforts have some shortcomings. In model design, they neither verify the basis and process of reputation evaluation nor pay attention to the diversity and intelligence of vehicle behaviors. In system construction, they fail to meet the management needs of multi-party participation and provide verifiable reputation management services. In this paper, we propose$\mathcal{R}$-tracing, a consortium blockchain-based vehicle reputation management scheme. The main contribution of our work lies in three points. First, a vehicle reputation model is designed with a reward and punishment mechanism and a regular tax mechanism. Second, a vehicle reputation management system is constructed by multiple organizations, in which all tasks of reputation update are abstracted into three types of transactions. Finally, the effectiveness of$\mathcal{R}$-tracing is verified by extensive simulations running on a large-scale traffic scenario and performance evaluation on a prototype system. Compared with the typical linear reputation model, our model not only resists the usual malicious attack and selfish behavior but also effectively deals with the on-off attack and rational selfish behavior. In the throughput test,$\mathcal{R}$-tracing achieves 600tps, outperforming two state-of-the-art schemes.
With the continuous development of communication technology, drones are playing an important role in many fields, such as power transmission line inspection and agricultural pesticide spraying. In order to protect the data privacy and communication security of drones, many experts are considering blockchain as its enabling technology. However, due to their small size and limited power storage, drones cannot support energy-intensive blockchain applications. In addition, the future 6G communications need to implement an important key performance indicator, namely extremely low-power communications (ELPCs). As a consequence, research into green blockchain is becoming more and more popular. The broadcast of the blockchain is one of the most energy-intensive parts because it entails flooding and there are a lot of unnecessary communication processes. Therefore, in order to make blockchain more suitable for ELPC requirements in 6G communications and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) networks, we took the blockchain broadcast as an improvement candidate and designed LECast, a low-energy-consumption protocol. LECast first analyzes the energy consumption model of the communication between two drones and constructs the shortest-path broadcast tree (SPB Tree) for the UAV networks to minimize energy consumption. Meanwhile, to make the sending drone address the receiving drone in a more convenient way, we proposed an extended Huffman coding (EHC) scheme to name the drones. Furthermore, the other issues with the broadcast tree are reliability and security. When a channel fails, subsequent drones cannot smoothly receive the transaction or block data. As a result, we introduced multichannel transmission with splitting data (MTSD); that is, the transaction or block data are divided into segments and transmitted in parallel multiple times over multiple channels. Finally, through the analysis and simulation of LECast in terms of energy consumption, latency, throughput, reliability, security, and coverage rate, the advantages of LECast were confirmed, which could meet the requirements of ELPCs and be well applied to UAV networks.
Abstract The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is the next phase in the evolution of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs).Multiple types of Smart Networks exists in our surrounding.i.e., Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), Crowd Sensing Networks (CSNs), and Internet of Vehicles, etc A VANET is a collection of mobile nodes (vehicles) that share data through ad hoc on-demand connections. Vehicle Tracking is one of the uses of IOV(Internet of Vehicles) and Vehicle Security is one of the major issues for all vehicle owners. On a vehicle, there are various on-board sensors that sense a vehicle’s motion and the surrounding environment. On-board sensors can also warn drivers about approaching vehicles, speeding, and slippery road conditions. The main aim of the paper is to provide solutions for False Data Injection Attack by Integration of Blockchain Based IPFS-Trust Management System with ML SVR Regression Model. Due to Network Assaults and Threats under Vanet System, the safety of the drivers is under stake and Critical. A rogue node can send out erroneous messages, causing unavoidable scenarios. We first filter the received data from Vehicles creating false traffic jam warning messages using the Machine learning SVR Regression Model where data is created and split into train and test data. We used Machine learning supervised algorithm to find whether the vehicle is a legitimate vehicle or an attacker vehicle and the result is validated using the parameters like Accuracy, Loss Rate, Precision, Recall, and F-Test Score. Algorithm Implementation results show that the FDIA attack strategy achieves a better performance than the without using ML algorithm of SVR Regression Model based attack strategy in Predicting the Vanet Security. Also, we studied the various ways to mitigate the impact of false data injection into the network through a compromised node. Users can access the system through DApp, an Ethereum-distributed application, and manage their vehicle data.
Jing Zhang, Huixia Fang, Hong Zhong, Jie Cui · 5 authors
Traffic route management is essential for reducing traffic jams and enhancing driving safety because of the growing number of vehicles and frequent occurrence of traffic accidents. However, in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), real-time messages are transmitted via wireless channels, which can result in security and privacy concerns. Existing proposals for traffic route management exist security vulnerabilities, as well as high calculation and communication costs. Encouraged by this fact, we design a lightweight traffic route management scheme for fog-based VANETs. In this scheme, vehicles utilize homomorphic encryption to encrypt their driving routes and then send the encrypted information to a fog node. The traffic management center (TMC) decrypts the received ciphertexts that are aggregated by the fog node and performs traffic management according to the decrypted data, without knowing individual route of each vehicle. Furthermore, blockchain is used in the scheme to conduct public keys management of vehicles. Our detailed security proof and analysis indicate that our proposal can meet the security objectives of VANETs. Further, to demonstrate the feasibility of the scheme, we also implement it in the Ethereum test network (i.e., Rinkeby). Significantly, the performance analysis demonstrates that our proposal achieves a better performance than other relevant representative schemes.
Traffic safety applications and other communication systems for vehicles together with data collection sensors have the potential to improve road safety. For this to be viable however, it is important that the data collection and communication can be trusted so that erroneous or malicious data does not impact the use cases of the applications. This paper studies current and upcoming solutions to such problems and how they can be modified and applied to meet both technical requirements as well as the needs of relevant stakeholders. The paper defines the TruVeLedger framework using technology from the fields of distributed ledgers and vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to create a trusted platform. The paper considers the viability of different approaches to such a platform as well as defining a verifiable trusted communication protocol for vehicular networks.
Mahmoud A. Shawky, Abdul Jabbar, Muhammad Usman, Muhammad Ali Imran · 7 authors
This letter proposes a group key distribution scheme using smart contract-based blockchain technology. The smart contract’s functions allow for securely distributing the group session key, following the initial legitimacy detection using public key infrastructure-based authentication. For message authentication, we propose a lightweight symmetric key cryptography-based group signature method, supporting the security and privacy requirements of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Our discussion examined the scheme’s robustness against typical adversarial attacks. To evaluate the gas costs associated with smart contracts functions, we implemented it on the Ethereum main network. Finally, comprehensive analyses of computation and communication costs demonstrate the scheme’s effectiveness.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become an indispensable technology to bridge vehicles, persons, and infrastructures and is promising to make our cities smarter and more connected. It enables vehicles to exchange vehicular data (e.g., GPS, sensors, and brakes) with different entities nearby. However, sharing these vehicular data over the air raises concerns about identity privacy leakage. Besides, the centralized architecture adopted in existing IoV systems is fragile to single point-of-failure and malicious attacks. With the emergence of blockchain technology, there is the chance to solve these problems due to its features of being tamper-proof, traceability, and decentralization. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving vehicular data sharing framework based on blockchain. In particular, we design an anonymous and auditable data sharing scheme using Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) technology so as to protect the identity privacy of vehicles while preserving the vehicular data auditability for Trusted Authorities (TAs). In response to high mobility of vehicles, we design an efficient multi-sharding protocol to decrease blockchain communication costs without compromising the blockchain security. We implement a prototype of our framework and conduct extensive experiments and simulations on it. Evaluation and analysis results indicate that our framework can not only strengthen system security and data privacy but also reduce communication complexity by \(O(\frac{n\sqrt {m}}{m^2})\) times compared to existing sharding protocols.
M R Jivthesh, Rohit Mathew Samuel, M R Gaushik, N B Sai Shibu · 6 authors
Intelligent transportation systems with Vehicle to Everything (V2X) connectivity can help smart cities solve problems like pedestrian jaywalking, vehicle collision, and traffic congestion. V2X offers seamless connectivity between road in-frastructures and driver assistance systems with crowd-sourced data to guide design and feature sets. V2X applications raise security and privacy risks despite their benefits. Risks include data loss, device failure, and environmental damage. The current PKI-based V2X ecosystem requires many pseudonym keys to work successfully. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) often encoun-ters bottlenecks due to the enormous volume of authorisation, registration, and confirmation requests. When we transit to a means of fully autonomous transport, an enormous amount of data related to vehicle movement will flood the V2X network. A considerable infrastructure setup is needed to validate these mes-sages. Blockchain technology offers distributed ledger technology and a decentralised data processing mechanism. So blockchain can solve the issue of validating the messages in the V2X network. This paper proposes Smartverse, a blockchain technology-based authentication method to validate messages in the V2X ecosystem. We used the Ethereum blockchain platform, Interplanatary File System (IPFS) and developed algorithms to validate the crowd-sourced data in the V2X network. When a user submits data, say vehicle collision, other users in the V2X network validate the data by a voting mechanism. Once the messages are marked valid, other V2X users will receive this message. This paper explains the blockchain-based V2X network architecture and message validation algorithm.
With the increasing number of vehicles connected to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), to accommodate the evolving needs and patterns of new vehicles, passengers, and drivers, traditional single Trusted Authority (TA) authentication model may no longer be suitable for the IoV scenario, it is crucial to develop secure, lightweight, efficient, and cross-TA identity authentication and key agreement algorithms. In 2021, Xu et al. proposed a blockchain-based Roadside Unit (RSU)-assisted authentication and key agreement protocol for IoV. However, we describe that their protocol is vulnerable to identity guessing attacks, vehicle forgery attacks, and lacks of session key security and known session key secrecy, and propose a novel blockchain and elliptic curve cryptography-based cross-TA authentication and key agreement protocol for IoV. Our protocol uses Physical Unclonable Functions (PUF) and biometric keys to resist RSU capture attacks and Onboard Unit (OBU) intrusion attacks. Formal security proof and comparative analysis indicate that the proposed protocol can resist various known attacks and maintains lower computational complexity.
Vehicular adhoc networks (VANETs) are an interesting area of exploration among the intelligent transportation research community.Communication among vehicles with infrastructure units is an essential component.Thus, trust and privacy are important concerns in addition to dynamic topology, which is the main characteristic of VANETs.Ensuring the vehicles do not broadcast false information as well as protecting the identity of vehicles against tracking attacks are the objectives of this article.Here, a blockchain-based solution has been proposed to establish an identity-preserving trust model for VANETs.It preserves the real identities of vehicles with the utilization of Ethereum blockchain technology.A trust evaluation algorithm has been implemented to stop the dissemination of fraudulent messages.Validation of the algorithm has been conducted by running the algorithm in different VANET scenarios.
In the fire scene investigation, the firefighting Internet of Things (IoT) data is the key electronic evidence for event analysis and responsibility determination. However, the traditional centralized storage method leads to data easy to be tampered with and damaged. To solve these problems, this paper designs and implements a secure, reliable and low-cost distributed firefighting IoT data storage scheme based on the Fabric framework, combining blockchain technology, Interplanetary File System (IPFS) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm to provide a strong support for fire accident traceability. This scheme mainly includes the storage model, key algorithms and Fabric construction and improvement. IPFS stores the complete firefighting IoT data, as the off-chain storage system of the blockchain, and the blockchain only stores the storage address (IPFS hash) of data returned by IPFS, thus reducing the storage space overhead of the blockchain and ensuring data security. Further, we adopt the Fabric framework as the blockchain platform for firefighting IoT data, and embed the PBFT consensus algorithm into the framework to ensure the reliability of consensus nodes in Fabric, thus improving the availability of the blockchain. In addition, we use the AES and RSA algorithms to ensure the security of firefighting IoT data storage and transmission. Through system analysis and experimental testing, the proposed scheme meets the need for secure storage and traceability of firefighting IoT data. Compared with the storage scheme using only blockchain, the blockchain combined with IPFS technology has advantages in storage space occupation, significantly improved throughput, and lower latency overhead. Meanwhile, compared with the official Fabric, the improved Fabric supports Byzantine fault tolerance and has better security.