The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has a tremendous prospect for numerous vehicular applications. IoV enables vehicles to transmit data to improve roadway safety and efficiency. Data security is essential for increasing the security and privacy of vehicle and roadway infrastructures in IoV systems. Several researchers proposed numerous solutions to address security and privacy issues in IoV systems. However, these issues are not proper solutions that lack data authentication and verification protocols. In this paper, a blockchain-enabled automated data management system for vehicles has been proposed and demonstrated. This work enables automated data verification and authentication using smart contracts. Certified organizations can only access vehicle data uploaded by the vehicle user to the Interplanetary File System (IPFS) server through that vehicle user’s consent. The proposed system increases the security of vehicles and data. Vehicle privacy is also maintained here by increasing data privacy.
With the advantages of decentralization and high reliability, the blockchain is widely used in vehicular networks, which has attracted widespread attention from academia and industries. However, when combining blockchain into vehicular networks, there exist three challenges: 1) how to access pre-deployed blockchain when vehicles are disconnected from network infrastructures, 2) how to reduce the communication overhead caused by an increasing network scale while maintaining decentralization of blockchains, 3) how to balance limited vehicle's resources and high throughput of blockchain. To address these challenges, we propose an efficient Device-to-Device (D2D) Network-empowered blockchain framework to receive and process transactions from D2D vehicles. We then propose a grouped and leaderless consensus mechanism to reduce communication overhead as the network scale increases. We also propose an elastic resource allocation scheme using the Lyapunov optimization theory to achieve high throughput given limited resources. Finally, numerical results show that the proposed mechanisms achieve D2D interaction under different network conditions and better performance than existing approaches.
Wenxuan Ye, Xueli Ant, Xueqiang Yan, Mohammad Hamad · 5 authors
AI/ML is envisioned to play an essential role in 6G mobile communication systems. The privacy-preserving capabil-ities of Federated Learning (FL) make it promising in vertical applications; however, the central server-based system and lack of trusted data management limit its widespread use. To effectively support FL as a service from a network architecture perspective, this work provides a comprehensive design including three key features: First, the network architecture enables transparent and traceable data management based on Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) platform, and realizes distributed and off-chain data storage by adopting Distributed Data Storage Entity (DDSE). Second, the central aggregator of an FL service is decoupled from the data management scheme mentioned above, and is decentralized through smart contracts for aggregator selection among a set of aggregator candidates, with the selected aggregator subsequently responsible for client selection and model aggregation. Third, a completed set of procedures for FL services operations is defined. A simulation system is developed to verify the feasibility of the proposed architecture and to study the impact of introducing the data management mechanisms on the overall performance overhead. The results show that the impact is related to the FL settings, with a worst-case time overhead of 15% observed in selected test cases, i.e., 15% of the total time spent on the interactions with the DLT platform and DDSE.
Abstract The generation of the pseudonym in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) usually requires the participation of a trusted center (TA), and it needs multiple interactions with the TA. To address these problems, we propose a novel traceable self-generated pseudonym based on the non-interactive zero-knowledge proof (NIZK) and consortium blockchain in VANETs. In our scheme, a self-generated pseudonyms method is introduced to eliminate excessive communication burden, and a consortium blockchain is composed of multiple roadside units (RSUs) to replace the TA. RSUs in the consortium blockchain verify the effectiveness of OBU’s self-generated pseudonyms through the consensus mechanism. Multiple trace authorities (TRAs) are designed to jointly tracking of the real identity of the OBU, which effectively prevents the abuse of supervision by the only supervisor.
Vehicular network is an emerging and advanced component in the field of transportation systems. In vehicular network, all authenticated vehicles can communicate with each other and with other components of the network. This is done to ensure the security of the information shared among vehicles. The information may contain sensitive data like speed of vehicle, vehicle's identity, and current position of vehicle. Vehicular network provides various different advantages to drivers but at the time it is susceptible to privacy and security attacks. It is essential to address various security and privacy issues. Existing possible solutions are not feasible for providing security in the vehicular network. Therefore, blockchain has been introduced in the vehicular network that provides decentralized platform which is capable of managing and handling resources. Further, it resists various security attacks that may occur in the network. This paper provides the review of blockchain-based vehicular network and discusses the various schemes used by different authors involving blockchain in vehicular networks.
Abdullah Ayub Khan, Asif Ali Laghari, Muhammad Shafiq, Shafique Ahmed Awan · 5 authors
Due to globalization and advances in network technology, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with edge computing has gained increasingly more attention over the last few years. The technology provides a new paradigm to design interconnected distributed nodes in Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV)-assisted vehicle networks for communications between vehicles in smart cities. The process hierarchy of the current UAV-assisted networks is also becoming more multifaceted as more vehicles are connected, requiring accessing and exchanging information, performing tasks, and updating information securely. This poses serious issues and limitations to centralized UAV-assisted vehicle networks, directly affecting computing-intensive tasks and data offloading. This paper bridges these gaps by providing a novel, transparent, and secure lifecycle for UAV-assisted distributed vehicle communication using blockchain hyperledger technology. A modular infrastructure for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) is designed and ‘B-UV2X’, a blockchain hyperledger fabric-enabled distributed permissioned network-based consortium structure, is proposed. The participating nodes of the vehicle are interconnected with others in the chain of smart cities and exchange different information such as movement, etc., preserving operational logs on the blockchain-enabled immutable ledger. This automates IoV transactions over the proposed UAV-assisted vehicle-enabled consortium network with doppler spread. Thus, for this purpose, there are four different chain codes that are designed and deployed for IoV registration, adding new transactions, updating the ledger, monitoring resource management, and customized multi-consensus of proof-of-work. For lightweight IoV authentication, B-UV2X uses a two-way verification method with the defined hyperledger fabric consensus mechanism. Transaction protection from acquisition to deliverance and storage uses the NuCypher threshold proxy re-encryption mechanism. Simulation results for the proposed B-UV2X show a reduction in network consumption by 12.17% compared to a centralized network system, an increase in security features of up to 9.76%, and a reduction of 7.93% in the computational load for computed log storage.
Jaewon Noh, Yongseok Kwon, Junggab Son, Sunghyun Cho
One significant security challenge in vehicular networks is defending against malicious members’ attacks, including insiders and compromised authorities. Insiders are legitimate vehicles who have passed the registration process. Since they can exploit all the information related to the network and other members’ communication, it is easier to perform various attacks with a high impact. In addition, an authority takes charge of registering and managing legitimate vehicles. Thus, if the authority is compromised, it will cause significant damage to the system, including the leaking of private information, such as identity, location, and membership. Many authentication schemes have been proposed to protect vehicular communication from these security issues. However, most existing schemes still face the vulnerability of malicious members. Furthermore, most conventional schemes require additional interactions between the vehicles and infrastructure for authentication, which can cause communication overheads. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel blockchain-based one-time authentication scheme to protect vehicular communication against malicious members. One-time authentication provides higher security and efficiency as every message is authenticated with different proof at a time. We use publicly verifiable secret sharing with blockchain for this property, which brings two benefits. First, it prevents even an authority from obtaining members’ identities by distributing encrypted shares instead of their real identities. Second, it enables robust vehicular communication against insiders’ attacks by allowing a vehicle to send unique proof generated from its private information with messages. Receivers can authenticate the messages by comparing attached values to the information through the blockchain in a noninteractive manner. Security analysis shows that our scheme assures secure vehicle-to-everything communication against insider attacks, and efficiency analysis shows how both authentication and consensus delay change.
Many researchers have introduced blockchain into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to support trading or other authentication applications between vehicles. However, the traditional blockchain cannot well support the query of transactions that occur in a specified area which is important for vehicle users since they are bound to the geolocations. Therefore, the querying efficiency of the geolocation attribute of transactions is vital for blockchain-based applications. Existing work does not well handle the geolocation of vehicles in the blockchain, and thus the querying efficiency is questionable. In this paper, we design a rapid query method of regional transactions in blockchain for IoV, including data structures and query algorithms. The main idea is to utilize the Geohash code to represent the area and serve as the key for transaction indexing and querying, and the geolocation is marked as one of the attributes of transactions in the blockchain. To further verify and evaluate the proposed design, on the basis of the implementation of Ethereum, which is a well-known blockchain, the results show that the proposed design achieves significantly better-querying speed than Ethereum.
Vankamamidi S. Naresh, V. V. L. Divakar Allavarpu, Sivaranjani Reddi
The advent of group-oriented communication applications has triggered research on secure group communication (SGC) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Given this, some researchers worked in this area and proposed various schemes. However, these systems lacking the dynamic nature, and struggling with larger processing loads, enormous storage, increased communications, security, and privacy concerns. Further, with the increase in the size of VANET, it is challenging to manage processing loads and storage requirements of group controller (GC)-centric group key agreement (GKA). To address these drawbacks in existing VANET communications, we propose a blockchain IOTA sharding-based smart contract-centric GKA for SGC in large VANETs. In this scheme, we partition the main network into${r}$sharded subnetworks using blockchain sharding technique, with$G_{1}, G_{2}, G_{3},\ldots, G_{r}$as smart contract (SC) instances generated by GC, G, which functions as Sub-GC (Sub-GC) to their respective shards. Under the Elliptic curve decision Diffie–Hellman (ECDDH) and group-Elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (GECCDH) assumptions, the proposed protocol is proven to be secure. The suggested protocol outperforms the other protocols for secure communication in large VANETs, according to the performance analysis.
Cooperative perception is an essential and widely discussed application of connected automated vehicles. However, the authenticity of perception data is not ensured, because the vehicles cannot independently verify the event they did not see. Many methods, including trust-based (i.e., statistical) approaches and plausibility-based methods, have been proposed to determine data authenticity. However, these methods cannot verify data without a priori knowledge. In this study, a novel approach of constructing a self-proving data from the number plate of target vehicles was proposed. By regarding the pseudonym and number plate as a shared secret and letting multiple vehicles prove they know it independently, the data authenticity problem can be transformed to a cryptography problem that can be solved without trust or plausibility evaluations. Our work can be adapted to the existing works including ETSI/ISO ITS standards while maintaining backward compatibility. Analyses of common attacks and attacks specific to the proposed method reveal that most attacks can be prevented, whereas preventing some other attacks, such as collusion attacks, can be mitigated. Experiments based on realistic data set show that the rate of successful verification can achieve 70\% to 80\% at rush hours.
Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is a modern concept of transportation that was formulated by extending Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). VANET presents diverse opportunities to modernize transportation to enhance safety, security, and privacy. Direct communication raises various limitations, most importantly, the overhead ratio. The most prominent solution proposed is to divide these nodes into clusters. In this paper, we propose a clustering mechanism that provides security and maintains quality after the cluster formulation based on the pre-defined Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters. To address potential attacks in the VANET environment, the proposed mechanism uses blockchain to encrypt the trust parameters’ computation. A particular trust degree of a vehicle is evaluated by the base station, encrypted with the blockchain approach, and transmitted toward roadside units (RSUs) for further utilization. The system’s performance is evaluated and compared with the existing approaches. The results show a significant improvement in terms of security and clustering quality.
As an irreversible trend, connected vehicles have become increasingly more popular. They depend on the generation and sharing of data between vehicles to improve safety and efficiency of the transportation system. Due to the open feature of the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), it is possible for dishonest and misbehaving vehicles to disrupt traffic by transmitting false information. In recent years, misbehavior detection systems have been developed to detect the malicious behaviour, and machine learning methods have been employed to make the detection more accurately. However, existing misbehavior detection systems typically require a single entity (e.g., a central server) for centralized data collection and training. Model updates are restricted due to data privacy and high overhead of data communication, which reduces the defensive capability of misbehavior detection systems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based federated learning scheme to detect misbehavior, which is trained collaboratively by coordinating multiple distributed edge devices while ensuring data security and privacy. In addition, to further protect the privacy of the model on the blockchain, differential privacy with the Gaussian mechanism is leveraged to provide strict privacy protection. Common data falsification attacks are studied in this paper. The experimental results show that our proposed scheme is feasible and effective, and demonstrate that our scheme achieves satisfied accuracy and efficiency.
Vehicular Fog Computing (VFC) is a paradigm of vehicular networks that has a set of advantages such as agility, efficiency, and reduced latency. The VFC is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, and existing security measures in traditional networks are not necessarily applicable to VFC. Among these attacks, we can find the Sybil attack that allows a vehicle to create multiple identities to perform malicious operations. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based mechanism to detect Sybil attacks in VFC networks. The detection process consists of two levels; the first one is targeted toward the verification of the vehicle’s position by the FN using the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) technique. The FN delivers a position proof, if its position is valid, and stores it in the blockchain. At this point, the set of the obtained position proofs constitutes a trajectory. The second level is projected toward a comparison between the trajectories of the vehicles reporting an event. Two trajectories that pass through the same FNs at the same time, will be considered as Sybil trajectories. The objective of these two-level detections is to identify the Sybil attack in several attack scenarios performed by a powerful adversary. Our analysis shows that existing proposals cannot deal with such an adversary. Moreover, simulation results show the efficiency of our proposal in terms of communication, computation, and detection rate. Indeed, our system can reach a detection rate of 98% when the malicious vehicle generates several aliases simultaneously and sends position requests to the FN for each generated pseudonym.
Rajesh Kumar Dhanaraj, Seifedine Kadry Rajesh Kumar Dhanaraj, Byeong-Gwon Kang Seifedine Kadry, Yunyoung Nam Byeong-Gwon Kang
<p>To address the current security challenges, Digital Twin (DT) models and strategies are to be applied to improve security, privacy, and safety in intelligent transportation systems. However, the existing algorithm was failed to address the security and privacy issues for data between the vehicles. To enhance the security of data transmission, a novel Probit Regressive Davis Mayer Kupyna Cryptographic Hash Blockchain (PRDMKCHB) technique is proposed. Initially, the source vehicle finds the nearest vehicle to transmit the data based on the trust value using the probit regression function. After finding the neighboring nodes, the Blockchain is constructed to improve the security of data transmission from the source to the destination. The Blockchain uses the Kupyna Cryptography to generate the hash value for each data. Davis Mayer compression function is to improve the security of data delivery and to minimize packet loss. The comprehensive simulation is carried out to validate the performance of the proposed PRDMKCHB technique and existing Blockchain technology in terms of packet delivery ratio, packet loss rate, and execution time. Simulation results show the performance improvement of the proposed PRDMKCHB technique compared to the previous Blockchain technology in terms of higher packet delivery ratio, minimum packet loss, and execution time with respect to the number of data packets.</p> <p>&nbsp;</p>
Rapid advancements in the fifth generation (5G) communication technology and mobile edge computing (MEC) paradigm have led to the proliferation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) in urban air mobility (UAM) networks, which provide intelligent services for diversified smart city scenarios. Meanwhile, the widely deployed Internet of drones (IoD) in smart cities has also brought up new concerns regarding performance, security, and privacy. The centralized framework adopted by conventional UAM networks is not adequate to handle high mobility and dynamicity. Moreover, it is necessary to ensure device authentication, data integrity, and privacy preservation in UAM networks. Thanks to its characteristics of decentralization, traceability, and unalterability, blockchain is recognized as a promising technology to enhance security and privacy for UAM networks. In this paper, we introduce LightMAN, a lightweight microchained fabric for data assurance and resilience-oriented UAM networks. LightMAN is tailored for small-scale permissioned UAV networks, in which a microchain acts as a lightweight distributed ledger for security guarantees. Thus, participants are enabled to authenticate drones and verify the genuineness of data that are sent to/from drones without relying on a third-party agency. In addition, a hybrid on-chain and off-chain storage strategy is adopted that not only improves performance (e.g., latency and throughput) but also ensures privacy preservation for sensitive information in UAM networks. A proof-of-concept prototype is implemented and tested on a micro-air–vehicle link (MAVLink) simulator. The experimental evaluation validates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed LightMAN solution.
Smart cities are our aspiration for a better life where transportation intelligence is indispensable. Recent technological advances in intelligent transportation systems have opened up new possibilities for smart mobility in smart cities. Here we present TengYun, a transportation foundation model designed and developed with parallel learning and federated intelligence for our transportation metaverse called TransVerse. TengYun enables decentralized/distributed autonomous organizations with decentralized/ distributed operations, as well as various federated technologies, from federated security, federated control, federated management, federated services, to federated ecology for transportation intelligence in smart cities. An example for a federation of transportation transformers is discussed for illustrating the operating procedure of TengYun.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) can significantly improve transportation efficiency and ensure traffic safety. Authentication is regarded as the fundamental defense line against attacks in IoV. However, the state-of-the-art approaches suffer from several drawbacks, including bottlenecks of the single cloud server model, high computational overhead of operations, excessive trust in cloud servers and roadside units (RSUs), and leakage of vehicle trajectory privacy. In this paper, BEPHAP, a Blockchain-based Efficient Privacy-preserving Handover Authentication Protocol with key agreement for internet of vehicles, is introduced to address these problems. BEPHAP achieves anonymous cross-domain mutual handover authentication with key agreement based on the tamper-proof blockchain, symmetric cryptography, and the chameleon hash function under a security model that cloud servers and RSUs may launch attacks. BEPHAP is particularly well suited for IoV since it allows vehicles only need to perform lightweight cryptographic operations during the authentication phase. BEPHAP also achieves data confidentiality, unlinkability, traceability, non-repudiation, non-frameability, and key escrow freeness. Formal verification based on ProVerif and formal security proofs based on the BAN logic indicates that BEPHAP is resistant to various typical attacks, such as man-in-the-middle attacks, impersonation attacks, and replay attacks. Performance analysis demonstrates that BEPHAP surpasses existing works in both computation and communication efficiencies. And the message loss rate remains 0 at 5000 requests per second, which meets the requirement of IoV.
Collins Sey, Hang Lei, Weizhong Qian, Xiaoyu Li · 8 authors
The rapid advancement of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has led to a massive growth in data received from IoV networks. The cloud storage has been a timely service that provides a vast range of data storage for IoV networks. However, existing data storage and access models used to manage and protect data in IoV networks have proven to be insufficient. They are centralized and usually accompanied by a lack of trust, transparency, security, immutability, and provenance. In this paper, we propose VBlock, a blockchain-based system that addresses the issues of illegal modification of outsourced vehicular data for smart city management and improvement. We introduce a novel collusion-resistant model for outsourcing data to cloud storage that ensures the network remains tamper-proof, has good data provenance and auditing, and solves the centralized problems prone to the single point of failure. We introduced a key revocation mechanism to secure the network from malicious nodes. We formally define the system model of VBlock in the setting of a consortium blockchain. Our simulation results and security analysis show that the proposed model provides a strong security guarantee with high efficiency and is practicable in the IoV environment.
Panagiotis Michalopoulos, James Meijers, Srisht Fateh Singh, Andreas Veneris
Inter-vehicle communications can enable a wide array of novel applications that improve transportation safety and efficiency. However, due to the adversarial environment in which vehicles may operate, it is important to ensure information integrity. To achieve this, we present a blockchain-based reputation mechanism that allows participants to assess the trustworthiness of the received data based on the existing reputation score of the sender. After each data exchange, the receiver rates the sender by uploading an evaluation to the blockchain. To ensure that no tracking of the participants is possible, despite the open nature of the blockchain, we propose an address rotation scheme based on Zero Knowledge Proofs. Vehicles have the capability to change their blockchain address at regular intervals, while at the same time keeping their reputation score. Finally, we conduct experiments and simulations to evaluate our proposed system. The obtained results show that information integrity is ensured even in the presence of large number of adversaries and that privacy protection can be achieved at a reasonable cost.
Over the last few years, smart vehicles have continuously grown and connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), sensors, and advanced communication technologies. Then, it creates a cluster of distributed networks known as IoT-enabled Smart Vehicular Networks. Integrating smart vehicular networks, IoT, and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) provide interactive solutions such as traffic efficiency, driving safety, autonomous driving, and robust information exchange in the smart city infrastructure. Still, Smart vehicular networks have challenges, such as privacy preservation, security, data authentication, communication bandwidth, and centralization due to vehicles and networks-related data directly stored in the traditional cloud. Motivated by advanced technologies, including Blockchain and Federated Learning, we propose an approach for Privacy-Preserved IoT-enabled Smart Vehicular Networks to address these challenges. The concept of Blockchain and Federated Learning is leveraged in the middle layer of the proposed work for privacy preservation and smart vehicle data authentication, stored at the cloud layer. Furthermore, we show the technological flow of the proposed approach for the IoT-enabled smart vehicular networks in the smart city.
Low Emission Zones (LEZ)s are areas where access restrictions to polluting vehicles are enforced. These infrastructures have become a main mechanism in large cities to deal with urban traffic and environmental pollution. A main problem of practical LEZs is that they generally depend on a camera network that identifies users and jeopardizes their privacy. In the literature, there are some privacy-preserving works that rely on camera-free approaches; however, they still suffer from a major issue: they depend on centralized entities to manage the vehicles’ accesses/departures and their corresponding fee payment. Those centralized entities represent a critical single point of failure in the system, endangering its security and availability. In order to address this situation, this paper proposes a new scheme that decentralizes the LEZ management, dealing with vehicle accesses as blockchain transactions, and pricing and charging them using smart contracts. In order to validate the deployability of the new scheme in real scenarios, it has been implemented and tested in both a controlled environment and a low-traffic street. The evaluation of the smart contracts’ costs in terms of gas has been included in the performed tests. The results obtained are satisfactory and show the feasibility of the new proposal.