Abstract Because of a large number of vehicles in Internet of Vehicle(IoV), distributed nodes and complex driving environment, data security and certification speed are easily affected. Blockchain enables different devices that do not trust each other to work together, maintain the general state in the process of information dissemination and sharing, and protect the privacy of devices. However, at present, the speed of vehicle certification in IoV is slow, and the use of idle resources is not considered. To address this problem, this paper provides a blockchain-based vehicle identity verification scheme by using a hybrid identity code verification method to ensure the nodes in the network securely share information. Meanwhile, a task processing algorithm based on time window is proposed to optimize the utilization of idle resources. In addition, the method is evaluated by simulation experiment, and the designed scheme can reduce malicious behavior of a registered vehicle in the network, and can shorten the processing task delay.
Abstract The realization of fully autonomous vehicles in great scale is already in sight. However, to be safe and reliable, autonomous driving requires a significant amount of communication with cloud services, which are prone to many kinds of failures and malicious attacks. This paper introduces the use of AIngle, a novel distributed-ledger technology developed to guarantee real-time encrypted communication among IoT devices. Not only AIngle tackles various kinds of malicious attacks by design, such as Sybil attacks, but it also enables semantic distributed applications (Sem D Apps). Sem D Apps decentralize supporting driving services, such as traffic and route mapping, which are typically centralized in cloud services. AIngle provides a new paradigm for Sem D Apps, that will support future-proofed, fast, reliable, intelligent distributed applications for the autonomous vehicle industry.
In the last few years, the Internet of things (IoT) has recently gained attention in developing various smart city applications such as smart healthcare, smart supply chain, smart home, smart grid, etc. The existing literature focuses on the smart healthcare system as a public emergency service (PES) to provide timely treatment to the patient. However, little attention is given to a distributed smart fire brigade system as a PES to protect human life and properties from severe fire damage. The traditional PES are developed on a centralised system, which requires high computation and does not ensure timely service fulfilment. Furthermore, these traditional PESs suffer from a lack of trust, transparency, data integrity, and a single point of failure issue. In this context, this paper proposes a Blockchain-Enabled Secure and Trusted (BEST) framework for PES in the smart city environment. The BEST framework focuses on providing a fire brigade service as a PES to the smart home based on IoT device information to protect it from serious fire damage. Further, we used two edge computing servers, an IoT controller and a service controller. The IoT and service controller are used for local storage and to enhance the data processing speed of PES requests and PES fulfilments, respectively. The IoT controller manages an access control list to keep track of registered IoT gateways and their IoT devices, avoiding misguiding the PES department. The service controller utilised the queue model to handle the PES requests based on the minimum service queue length. Further, various smart contracts are designed on the Hyperledger Fabric platform to automatically call a PES either in the presence or absence of the smart-home owner under uncertain environmental conditions. The performance evaluation of the proposed BEST framework indicates the benefits of utilising the distributed environment and the smart contract logic. The various simulation results are evaluated in terms of service queue length, utilisation, actual arrival time, expected arrival time, number of PES departments, number of PES providers, and end-to-end delay. These simulation results show the effectiveness and feasibility of the BEST framework.
The upcoming development in vehicle to grid network (V2G) allows for the flow of energy from battery powered Electric Vehicle (EV) to grid as well as the exchange of information between them. However, during the information exchange, the EV’s confidential information should be transferred from one charging station to another in a secure manner. Furthermore, the anonymity of the EV and charging station should be preserved. Despite the fact that many works on anonymous authentication and privacy preservation exist, there is an increase in computational cost in existing surveys. In this work, the new charging station authenticates the EV using blockchain technology without the involvement of a trusted entity, resulting in a reduction in computational time. Moreover, an efficient revoking mechanism is suggested to block the misbehaving charging station from the V2G network. In addition, security analysis section proves the resistant of our work against several possible well known attacks. Finally, to evaluate the performance of the work, the simulation is performed using CYGWIN platform and the results are proved to be noteworthy.
In vehicular networks, authentication technology provides a basic security means to achieve trusted communication between legitimate vehicles. Revocation checking for vehicle certificates is an indispensable procedure in the process of authentication to protect vehicular networks from attacks by non-legitimate vehicles. However, revocation checking introduces procedures that requires additional time to process which challenges latency-sensitive applications in vehicular networks. This challenge grows more evidently when considering the factor of privacy preservation. In this paper, we propose to offload partial revocation task to network edges to lighten the revocation process in vehicles. Particularly, we design a method to achieve decentralized Global Certificate Revocation List (GCRL) management in network edges using permissioned blockchain technologies. In the method, both tamper-proof property and quick synchronization of the GCRL are guaranteed. Besides, our method can detect illegal revocation behaviours by validation in vehicles. Finally, we build a prototype of our proposed solution based on Hyperledger Fabric, and compare with Proof-of-Work scheme in terms of blockchain synchronization latency performance.
One way of improving the security of a vehicular network is by incorporating blockchain technology into the network. However, under certain conditions, blockchain-based networks do pose several challenges, such as processing latency and limited throughput. Scalability, that is, the ability of the network to perform as expected with increasing loads, is also a concern. The current work aims to show that the deficiencies of the blockchain-based vehicular network can be reduced by using an off-chain approach where the major computing overhead of the main blockchain is channeled off-chain to speed up processing and provide scalability. Simulations are carried out to measure the performance and scalability of the blockchain network in terms of processing latency and data throughput. Simulations of operation under different conditions (varying number of nodes and members) are carried out using computers to represent roadside units and Rasberry Pis to represent the vehicles. The Ethereum blockchain is used as the main blockchain in the simulation with Raiden Network acting as the off-chain scaling solution for the network. The simulation results of 80 nodes network showed that the off-chain assisted blockchain network performs and scales better than the conventional blockchain network with improving the throughput by 17 times while lowering the latency by 99%.
Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) is an emerging technology in the smart city environment, enabling smart vehicles to form social groups and exchange data among themselves. SIoV facilitates many applications aiming to improve driving safety and traffic monitoring by sharing data among vehicles. It ensures a safe and comfortable drive. However, privacy, data confidentiality, and data integrity are the major challenges during multi-hop data transfer that must be addressed for the wide adoption of SIoV. The existing solutions do not provide anonymity and consume more network resources. To address these issues, we propose SIoVChain, a time-lock contract-based privacy-preserving data sharing scheme with incentives for SIoV. It does not only enable data sharing between vehicles anonymously but incentivizes them also. In addition, the proposed framework imposes a penalty anonymously if a malicious vehicle disseminates false information. SIoVChain is shown to be secure against stealing processing fee attack while preserving sender-receiver privacy and path privacy. Universal Composability (UC) framework is used to verify user privacy. The feasibility and efficiency of the scheme are also demonstrated.
Edge-Integrated Internet-of-Vehicles (IoV) sinks service to edge nodes, which responses quickly to vehicles' requests and alleviates the burden of cloud servers. In such scenario, the entities of IoV need to be mutually authenticated since potential attacks can impersonate edge nodes to send false instructions to vehicles, or impersonate legitimate service subscribers to get free-ride IoV services. Furthermore, due to the high mobility characteristics of vehicles, frequent authentication is required between vehicles and edge nodes. We hope that the authentication process can be conducted efficiently to ensure the continuous service. Existing works cannot balance the security and efficiency well. This is still an issue worthy of discussion. In this article, we propose SEA, a secure and efficient blockchain-assisted authentication scheme for IoV. SEA achieves mutual authentication among vehicles, edge nodes and cloud servers. Specifically, the cloud server is only involved when vehicles are initially authenticated. And edge nodes realize the authentication of vehicles by querying the authentication result recorded by cloud on the blockchain, which significantly reduces the cryptographic computation overhead and eliminates network communication delay. Besides, session keys between any two entities involved are negotiated, which can secure sensitive data of vehicles. Extensive experiments have been conducted to show the security and efficiency of SEA.
Abstract Artificial intelligence (AI) techniques implemented at a large scale in intelligent transport systems (ITS), have considerably enhanced the vehicles' autonomous behaviour in making independent decisions about cyber threats, attacks, and faults. While, AI techniques are based on data sharing among the vehicles, it is important to note that sensitive data cannot be shared. Thus, federated learning (FL) has been implemented to protect privacy in vehicles. On the other hand, the integrity of data and the safety of aggregation are ensured by using blockchain technology. This paper applied classification approaches to VANET and ITS cyber‐threats detection at the vehicle. Subsequently, by using blockchain and by applying an aggregation strategy to different models, models from the previous step were uploaded in a smart contract. Lastly, we returned the updated models to the vehicles. Furthermore, we conducted an experimental study to measure the effectiveness of the proposed prototype. In this paper, the VeReMi data set was distributed in a balanced manner into five parts in the experimental study. Thus, classification techniques were executed by each vehicle separately, and models were generated. Upon the aggregation of the models in blockchain, they were returned to the vehicles. Lastly, the vehicles updated their decision functions and accessed the precision and accuracy of cyber‐threat detection. The results indicated that the precision and accuracy decreased by 7.1% on average with comparable F 1‐score and recall. Our solution ensures the privacy preservation of vehicles whereas blockchain guarantees the safety of aggregation technique and low gas consumption.
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) aim to provide a comfortable driving experience. Sharing messages in VANETs can help with traffic management, congestion mitigation, and driving safety. However, forged or false messages may undermine the efficiency of VANETs. In this paper, we propose a security scheme based on blockchain technology, where two types of blockchain are constructed based on roadside units (RSUs) and Certificate Authorities (CAs), respectively. The proposed security scheme has multifold goals to identify malicious nodes and detect forged messages based on multiple factors, such as reputation of sender nodes, and time and distance effectiveness of messages. In addition, an incentive mechanism is introduced on the RSU blockchain to encourage RSUs to adopt active behaviors. Extensive simulations show that the proposed scheme exhibits superior performances to existing methods in detecting forged messages and identifying malicious nodes. Meanwhile, it provides privacy protection and improves the efficiency of vehicular networks.
Salabat Khan, Fei Luo, Zijian Zhang, Mussadiq Abdul Rahim · 7 authors
Vehicular social networking is expected to become a reality soon, where secure and privacy-preserving identity management is a prerequisite. Various organizations and studies have recommended using Vehicular Public-key Infrastructure (VPKI) to securely and privately manage vehicles' identities. However, the existing VPKI schemes still do not deal with identity management in vehicular social networking. In this work, we propose a Privacy-Preserving Identity Management (PPTIM) scheme for vehicular social networking to securely and privately manage vehicles' social identities. PPTIM builds on the transparency log (distributed ledger) proposals for web PKI, but it addresses challenges specific to vehicular social networking. All pseudo-social identities, pseudonym certificates issued against pseudo-social identities, revocation process, and revocation status validation are conducted on a transparency log. With an efficient data structure named the Accumulation Tree (AT), we extend the conventional transparency log to offer trustworthy pseudonym certificate validation without relying on the Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs). In addition, PPTIM strengthens the security of vehicular social networking by protecting vehicles to a greater extent from being duped by malicious pseudonym certificates through logging and constant monitoring. Finally, performance and security analysis show the cost-effectiveness and security of PPTIM.
Jianbin Li, Shike Li, Long Cheng, Qingzhi Liu · 6 authors
Consensus-based Speed Advisory System (CSAS) is used to recommend a consensus speed to a group of vehicles for specific application purposes, such as minimizing emissions or energy consumption. To remedy data privacy concerns for speed advisory services, the latest works have investigated how to get an optimal speed in a privacy-preserving manner. However, almost all the designs are based on a centralized architecture, which could still meet service trust issues, such as that a random speed could be recommended when the central server meets cyber incursion attacks. To address the problem, in this paper we propose BSAS, a trustworthy and privacy-preserving CSAS over the blockchain. Specifically, BSAS follows a fully decentralized architecture with cryptographic primitives to guarantee service trust and data privacy. Moreover, to encourage vehicles to participate in the service computing process, a value-driven incentive mechanism is also employed. We present the detailed design and implementation of BSAS, and our emulation results show that the proposed BSAS can achieve promising system performance in terms of real-time speed recommendation in a trustworthy and privacy-preserving way.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a new paradigm for vehicular networks. Using diverse access methods, IoV enables vehicles to connect with their surroundings. However, without data security, IoV settings might be hazardous. Because of the IoV's openness and self-organization, they are prone to malevolent attack. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a revolutionary blockchain-enabled game theory-based authentication mechanism for securing IoVs. Here, a three layer multi-trusted authorization solution is provided in which authentication of vehicles can be performed from initial entry to movement into different trusted authorities' areas without any delay by the use of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) in the beginning and later through duel gaming, and a dynamic Proof-of-Work (dPoW) consensus mechanism. Formal and informal security analyses justify the framework's credibility in more depth with mathematical proofs. A rigorous comparative study demonstrates that the suggested framework achieves greater security and functionality characteristics and provides lower transaction and computation overhead than many of the available solutions so far. However, these solutions never considered the prime concerns of physical cloning and side-channel attacks. However, the framework in this paper is capable of handling them along with all the other security attacks the previous work can handle. Finally, the suggested framework has been subjected to a blockchain implementation to demonstrate its efficacy with duel gaming to achieve authentication in addition to its capability of using lower burdened blockchain at the physical layer, which current blockchain-based authentication models for IoVs do not support.
In the smart culture where everything is going intelligently, there is a need to administer the intelligent transport system and improve the traffic congestion, accidents on road accidents, and above all suitable parking allocation. It is to be noted that intelligent vehicles are equipped with the internet that enables all types of communication with the surroundings. Automotive service providers like Uber and Ola are the inspiration behind Blockchain Technology and Autonomous Vehicles. In some countries, they provide automated autonomous vehicles for smooth travel management and are known as linked or connected autonomous vehicles. Although such services are susceptible to attacks like men-in-the-middle attacks, parodying of a global positioning system, DoS attacks, sniffing, and many similar attacks, those are creating hurdles in the development of fully automated vehicles wherein the parallel autonomous industry is growing so fast as self-driving cars. Most of the studies concentrate on a central system with a single point of failure. The paper discussed about blockchain and autonomous vehicles, architecture, security, and challenges.
Bi-Ying Wang, Zheng Chang, Shancang Li, Timo Hämäläinen
Recently, integrating satellite networks (e.g., low-Earth-orbit (LEO) satellite constellation) into the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem has emerged as a potential paradigm to provide more reliable, ubiquitous, and seamless network services. The LEO satellite networks serves as a key enabler to transform the connectivity across industries and geographical border. Despite the convenience brought from the LEO satellite networks, it arises security concerns, in which the essential one is to secure the communication between the IoT devices and the LEO satellite network. However, some challenges inheriting from the LEO satellite networks need to be considered, which are: the dynamic topology; the resource-constraint satellites; the relative long latency; and multiple beams authentication. In particular, the centralized authentication schemes are no longer suitable for the emerging LEO satellite-assisted IoT ecosystem. In this article, we first introduce the architecture of the LEO satellite network-assisted IoT ecosystem. Then, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving blockchain-based authentication scheme. The proposed authentication scheme takes the advantages of certificateless encryption and consortium blockchain to provide lightweight key pair computation without appealing devices’ information and efficient signature querying and verification. In addition, a fast authentication mechanism is implemented in the scheme in order to reduce the time complexity from querying a certain record for the authentication within a satellite among multiple beams. With the analysis of the storage and computation complexity, the performance evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a typical application of mobile Internet of Things (IoT), which aims to improve road conditions and enhance the driving experience. However, the issue of identity leakage has drawn a major privacy concern during the vehicle’s authentication. It is impractical to apply traditional anonymous authentication methods directly to the IoV system due to their complex computation. To enhance the user’s privacy and the service’s efficiency, we propose a novel efficient anonymous authentication approach for the IoV based on the zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) and elliptic curve cryptography (ECC). We achieve the user’s strong anonymity and authenticity based on the Fujisaki–Okamoto Commitment algorithm. In addition, the third trusted authority can effectively trace users by tracking users’ verification keys. It holds the user’s traceability when a violation occurs. Meanwhile, we design a fast reconnection procedure based on the security context from the last access, which can reduce the computation overhead effectively. Through the security analysis, it proves that our scheme provides the anonymity, mutual authenticity, unlinkability, traceability, forward security, and replay-attack resistance. The experimental results indicate that our scheme has a better performance compared with the classic protocols in the IoV.
With the advent of modern technologies, including the IoT and blockchain, smart-parking (SP) systems are becoming smarter and smarter. Similar to other automated systems, and particularly those that require automation or minimal interaction with humans, the SP system is heuristic in delivering performances, such as throughput in terms of latency, efficiency, privacy, and security, and it is considered a long-term cost-effective solution. This study looks ahead to future trends and developments in SP systems and presents an inclusive, long-term, effective, and well-performing smart autonomous vehicle parking (SAVP) system that explores and employs the emerging fog-computing and blockchain technologies as robust solutions to strengthen the existing collaborative IoT-cloud platform to build and manage SP systems for autonomous vehicles (AVs). In other words, the proposed SAVP system offers a smart-parking solution, both indoors and outdoors, and mainly for AVs looking for vacant parking, wherein the fog nodes act as a middleware layer that provides various parking operations closer to IoT-enabled edge devices. To address the challenges of privacy and security, a lightweight integrated blockchain and cryptography (LIBC) module is deployed, which is functional at each fog node, to authorize and grant access to the AVs in every phase of parking (e.g., from the parking entrance to the parking slot to the parking exit). A proof-of-concept implementation was conducted, wherein the overall computed results, such as the average response time, efficiency, privacy, and security, were examined as highly efficient to enable a proven SAVP system. This study also examined an innovative pace, with careful considerations to combatting the existing SP-system challenges and, therefore, to building and managing future scalable SP systems.
Baofeng Ji, Mingkun Zhang, Ling Xing, Xiaoli Li · 7 authors
The huge increase in the communication network rate has made the application fields and scenarios for vehicular ad hoc networks more abundant and diversified and proposed more requirements for the efficiency and quality of data transmission. To improve the limited communication distance and poor communication quality of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), an optimal intelligent routing algorithm is proposed in this paper. Combined multi-weight decision algorithm with the greedy perimeter stateless routing protocol, designed and evaluated standardized function for link stability. Linear additive weighting is used to optimize link stability and distance to improve the packet delivery rate of the IoV. The blockchain system is used as the storage structure for relay data, and the smart contract incentive algorithm based on machine learning is used to encourage relay vehicles to provide more communication bandwidth for data packet transmission. The proposed scheme is simulated and analyzed under different scenarios and different parameters. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce the packet loss rate and improve system performance.
Number of vehicles on the road is increasing day by day and as a result, the problems caused by these vehicles are also increasing. Hence, to overcome these problems related to road safety, Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is being used which plays a major role in solving these safety issues. VANET is a network created to transmit the data using road-side entities and vehicles. To make data transmission secure and storing data such that every user can have access to it in a secured way, the use of Blockchain is preferred. Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that can fulfill this requirement. There are many cryptographic techniques available that can be used for carrying out data transmission in VANET. This paper discusses and analyses various VANET system ideas for which researchers have carried out implementation. Still, there are many research challenges for carrying out secure transmission in VANET. This paper also proposes an approach to store the vehicular data securely by using Blockchain technology.
With the development of electric vehicle (EV) technology, EV has become a key component in the future smart grid. Due to the sheer large number of EVs on the road, the emerging vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which allows for two-way electrical flows between EVs and the power grid, is gaining traction. However, establishing a fair and private electricity exchange scheme has gradually become a critical challenge. The emergence of blockchain technology offers a novel approach for resolving this issue. In this study, we overview the opportunities and challenges of blockchain in the smart grid. Then, we provide a privacy-preserving blockchain-based electricity auction scheme for V2G networks in smart grid. In particular, we exploit PS group signatures to keep the privacy of EVs or charging stations and leverage blockchain to provide automated auction execution. With our mechanism, the identity of EV/charging station is conditionally protected. In case of an emergency, the trusted authority (i.e., the group manager) can open the identity. Meanwhile, we present the security analysis to prove our scheme’s security. Finally, we implement the experiment to evaluate efficiency. The experimental results show that our proposal is efficient and suitable for V2G networks.
Location-Based Services (LBSs) are essential in many application contexts like ride-sharing or navigation apps. There are cases where users could gain an advantage by submitting fake locations. The problem faced in this paper concerns the possibility that the geographic location declared by a user is not the actual location in which the user is placed. Some solutions are based on centralized or distributed verification in the literature, and other solutions are based on witnesses or infrastructure. In this paper, we highlight the limitations of such approaches and propose a new scheme that exploits signals coming from satellites to provide trustworthy location proofs, also respecting users' privacy. The proposed approach is decentralized because location proofs are stored by users in a suitably-encrypted way, and a blockchain is adopted to guarantee data integrity and authenticity. We show that the proposed approach overcomes the state of the art through a detailed analysis.
A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is essential in building an intelligent transportation system that optimizes traffic conditions and makes traffic information conveniently accessible. However, malicious vehicles may disrupt the traffic order via propagating forged traffic/road information. Therefore, using digital certificates based on cryptography, some existing authentication schemes were proposed to manage vehicles’ identities. At first glance, these schemes can effectively identify malicious vehicles. However, these schemes require more computation and storage resources to maintain certificates. This is because the data storage of the database increases in a near-linear trend as the number of certificates grows. In this paper, we propose an efficient blockchain-based authentication scheme for secure communication in VANET (EBAS) to address the aforementioned issues. In EBAS, the regional trusted authority (RTA) receives traffic messages uploaded by the vehicle, together with transactions constructed via the unspent transaction output (UTXO) model. The verifier checks the legitimacy of the single input contained in the uploaded transaction to verify the legitimacy of the message sender’s identity. In terms of privacy preservation, a asymmetric key encryption technique, elliptic curve cryptography (ECC), is applied for constructing the transaction pseudonym, and users participate in the authentication process anonymously. In addition, our scheme guarantees the scalability of EBAS by proposing a transaction update mechanism, which can keep data storage at a stable level rather than near-linear growth. Under the simulation, the retrieving overhead remains at approximately 0.32 ms while the storage cost is stable at around 32.7 M for the blockchain state database. In terms of authentication efficiency, the average overhead of the proposed scheme is around 0.942 ms, which outperforms the existing schemes.