Abdul Rehman Javed, Muhammad Abul Hassan, Faisal Shahzad, Waqas Ahmed · 7 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) revitalizes the world with tremendous capabilities and potential to be utilized in vehicular networks. The Smart Transport Infrastructure (STI) era depends mainly on the IoT. Advanced machine learning (ML) techniques are being used to strengthen the STI smartness further. However, some decisions are very challenging due to the vast number of STI components and big data generated from STIs. Computation cost, communication overheads, and privacy issues are significant concerns for wide-scale ML adoption within STI. These issues can be addressed using Federated Learning (FL) and blockchain. FL can be used to address the issues of privacy preservation and handling big data generated in STI management and control. Blockchain is a distributed ledger that can store data while providing trust and integrity assurance. Blockchain can be a solution to data integrity and can add more security to the STI. This survey initially explores the vehicular network and STI in detail and sheds light on the blockchain and FL with real-world implementations. Then, FL and blockchain applications in the Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) environment from security and privacy perspectives are discussed in detail. In the end, the paper focuses on the current research challenges and future research directions related to integrating FL and blockchain for vehicular networks.
The rapid evolution of vehicles leads to future vehicular technologies which improve transportation systems. One prominent technology is platooning networks where a vehicle, called platoon head, leads to a group of vehicles. Platoons not only improve the vehicle driving experience and safety but also reduce traffic congestion. Despite all these benefits, the authentication of vehicles for platoon networks is a critical problem in order to share and get access control to other vehicles. Moreover, due to the platoon networksâ complexity and high dynamic formation, it requires an efficient and robust authentication mechanism between vehicles. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based authentication protocol for platoons using the concept of the platoon as a service. Our approach not only proposes an efficient protocol that reduces the computation and communication for the authentication but also improves the security with the use of a distributed authentication (Auth-I) data ledger across the network and a token-based platoon authentication (Auth-II), which is suitable for practical implementations in areas with different traffic density.
Representing a new stage in the industrial value chain, Industry 4.0 paves the way to the future eco-systems of industrial innovation, where cyber-physical systems (e.g., smart machines) form its basis by bridging the physical and digital worlds. As one of the most popular groups in intelligent devices, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have shown great potential for facilitating various industrial sectors. With research on new applications flourishing, the accompanying communication security issue between UAVs is also of concern because of the vital role of communication in enabling the reliable performance of UAV networks. Authentication is recognized as the first defense line for guaranteeing communication security, but traditional authentication schemes are either highly dependent on the central authority or too costly for UAV networks, making them less feasible in practical applications. In this article, we propose a novel authentication scheme for UAV networks using blockchain technology, where blockchain edge nodes are introduced to maintain the ledger, while drones can just be clients to use the distributed blockchain services by calling smart contract APIs. Experimental results illustrate its efficiency, and future research directions are also summarized to guide explorations for realizing more general authentication systems for UAV-assisted industrial applications.
Mishri Saleh Al-Marshoud, Ali H. AlâBayatti, Mehmet Sabır Kiraz
Security and privacy in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are challenging in terms of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) features. The distribution and decentralisation of vehicles could threaten location privacy and confidentiality in the absence of trusted third parties (TTP)s or if they are otherwise compromised. If the same digital signatures (or the same certificates) are used for different communications, then adversaries could easily apply linking attacks. Unfortunately, most of the existing schemes for VANETs in the literature do not satisfy the required levels of security, location privacy, and efficiency simultaneously. This paper presents a new and efficient end-to-end anonymous key exchange protocol based on Yang et al. 's self-blindable signatures. In our protocol, vehicles first privately blind their own private certificates for each communication outside the mix-zone and then compute an anonymous shared key based on zero-knowledge proof of knowledge (PoK). The efficiency comes from the fact that once the signatures are verified, the ephemeral values in PoK are also used to compute a shared key through an authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange protocol. Therefore, the protocol does not require any further external information to generate a shared key. Our protocol also does not require an interference with the Roadside Units or Certificate Authorities, and hence can be securely run outside the mixed-zones. We demonstrate the security of our protocol in an ideal/real simulation paradigm. Hence, our protocol achieves secure authentication, forward unlinkability, and accountability. Furthermore, the performance analysis shows that our protocol is more efficient in terms of computational and communication overheads compared to existing schemes.
Cong Pu, Andrew Wall, Imtiaz Ahmed, KimâKwang Raymond Choo
Thanks to rapid advancements in microprocessors, battery technologies, and lightweight materials, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have received signif-icant interest in the past few years. As drone-related commercial and civilian applications are flourishing, Internet-of-Drones (IoD) is moving into the fast lane and quickly becoming a highly anticipated network paradigm, where drones and Zone Service Providers (ZSPs) coordinate knowledge sharing in a reliable, accurate, and efficient way. However, for the sake of both strategic and financial value to business and mission critical applications, it is of vital importance to address both data security and privacy preservation issues brought by drones' inherent resource constraints and wide-open wireless medium. In this paper, we propose a secure data collection and storage mechanism, also called SecureIoD, for the IoD environment. In SecureIoD, drones and ZSPs first mutually authenticate each other and establish a secure session key before sharing any sensitive data via an insecure wireless channel. Then, ZSPs pack the collected data into blocks and compete to add their blocks into the blockchain. We also propose a joint Proof-of- Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism to select the miner ZSP, where the more transactions are in the block, the easier a ZSP can solve the cryptographic puzzle. We present security verification and analysis to show that SecureIoD can resist various security attacks. Finally, we develop a real-world testbed, implement SecureIoD and existing SDDM and BACSIoD schemes, and carry out extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and analysis. Experimental results reveal that not only does SecureIoD have lower computation cost, energy consumption, miner selection time, and communication overhead, but also offer better security features and capabilities.
With the acceleration of the intelligent and networking processes of the automobile and transportation industries promoted by the IoV/V2X technology, the security problem of IoV/V2X is becoming increasingly serious. As an integrated application of distributed data storage, peer-to-peer transmission, consensus mechanism, encryption algorithms, and other technologies, Blockchain provides a new IoV/V2X security solution. This paper summarizes the research on Blockchain-based IoV/V2X security. First, it outlines the existing IoV/V2X security threats and protection methods, specifies the research value of Blockchain and IoV/V2X integration, and analyzes the Blockchain-based IoV/V2X security technology. Then, it sorts the existing Blockchain-based IoV/V2X security protection methods and their security architecture from the perspectives of communication security, data security, and application security. Finally, it proposes the development direction and research effort of Blockchain-based IoV/V2X security.
Prabhat Kumar, Randhir Kumar, Abhinav Kumar, A. Antony Franklin · 5 authors
Softwarized Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) use network programmability concept of Software-Defined Network (SDN) to separate the hardware control layer from the data layer via OpenFlow protocols. The softwarized UAV enable ubiquitous connection, as well as a flexible, cost-effective, and improved method for upgrading all network services without shutting down the entire system. However, the connectivity of UAVs with OpenFlow switches and their heavy reliance on unsecured communication protocols makes the entire network vulnerable. This is a critical concern, particularly in combat surveillance, where eavesdropping, adding, changing, or deleting messages during communications between deployed UAVs and SDN controller is a possible threat. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, this paper presents a novel secure data sharing framework for softwarized UAV environments that incorporates blockchain and Deep Learning (DL). First we present a blockchain-based technique to reg-ister, verify and thereafter validate the communication entities in softwarized UAV environment using smart contract-based Proof-of-Authentication (PoA) consensus mechanism. Additionally, a new deep neural network architecture-based flow analyzer is designed to detect illegitimate transactions. The latter combines a Stacked Contractive Sparse AutoEncoder with Attention-based Long Short-term Memory Neural Network (SCSAE-ALSTM) to improve intrusion detection process. The effectiveness of our framework over several standard baseline methodologies is demonstrated by security analysis and experimental findings.
The Internet of Vehicles is deployed in an open environment, and protecting its security and data privacy is the challenge. Carrying out the Internet of Vehicles secure authentication before interaction of information is an important part of ensuring the security foundation. Therefore, this article designs a safe and reliable Internet of Vehicles authentication and key agreement schemeassisted by blockchain. This article uses a multi-TA network model to improve the efficiency of authentication. Because of the rapid movement of vehicles, it will continue to appear cross-RSU and TA certification. Considering the disadvantages of most centralised authentication protocols using a single TA, this paper uses the multi-TA model to improve the efficiency of authentication. By usingblockchain technology to store the authentication information of vehicles, the cross-domain authentication of vehicles and the protection of user privacy information can be well realised. At the same time, in order to reduce the time of vehicle authentication, this scheme uses a lightweight calculation operation to complete the whole process of authentication. Through security analysis and results of Proverif simulation, the security of the solution is well proved, our scheme can resist various common attacks. Compared with some existing Internet of Vehicles security authentication protocols, the proposed scheme has a lower cost of computation, communication, and storage.
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential integration with the traditional Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we have witnessed the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which promises to seamlessly integrate into smart transportation systems. However, the key characteristics of IoV, such as high-speed mobility and frequent disconnections make it difficult to manage its security and privacy. The Blockchain, as a distributed tamper-resistant ledge, has been proposed as an innovative solution that guarantees privacy-preserving yet secure schemes. In this paper, we review recent literature on the application of blockchain to IoV, in particular, and intelligent transportation systems in general.
In the last decade, the Internet of Things has witnessed exponential growth in demand and development. The growth of IoT and the increasing need for automation have led to an exciting application in the transportation industry, namely the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Simply put, IoV systems are vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) enhanced by integrating them with automation over the internet. As briefly discussed in this paper, the IoV systems guarantee various advantages like a much safer and more efficient future. However, the primary challenge at hand is implementing IoV at the end-user level. Of the varied building blocks present on the road to the development of IoV, secure data transfer is an essential requirement, especially with recent advances in quantum computing. IOTA is a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) specifically designed to secure IoT data transmissions. This paper discusses the advantages of implementing IOTA for secure and private IoV systems. The paper suggests replacing IOTAâs current post-quantum signature scheme Winternitz One Time Signature (W-OTS) with CRYSTALS Dilithium. These two post-quantum signature schemes are evaluated against each other to establish that employing Dilithium reduces both latency and signature space required, bringing a significant improvement to IOTA. This improvisation is beneficial, especially for the fast-paced functioning of IoV environments.
Recent advances in wireless technology and embedded systems enable vehicles to share relevant traffic-related data to improve the transportation Quality-of-Service (QoS). However, due to the ubiquitousness of cyber-attacks, it is challenging to ensure the integrity of the data collected from cars. This paper proposes a novel architecture for road traffic events management in Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) relying on a permissioned blockchain . It also introduces the concept of micro-transactions to minimize communication and storage overhead . Through simulations, a rigorous performance evaluation of the proposed approach was conducted, and the micro-transactions effectiveness was assessed. In addition, a comparison with close works in the literature was performed. The proposed scheme ensures road traffic records integrity and traceability, and simulation results on the considered scenarios showed good performance .
The use of Electric Vehicles (EVs) has been gaining traction in recent years due to various reasons. While charging their EVs, users expose their identity and personal details, and an adversary being able to identify and track where users charge their EVs is a potential privacy threat. In this article, we propose a user-empowered privacy-preserving authentication protocol for EV charging based on Decentralized Identifier (DID) and Verifiable Credential (VC) to provide Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP)-security. The proposed method gives users full control over their identities and allows them to remain anonymous while charging from any station. Giving control over their identities empowers users. At the same time, by making use of the concept of VC, other parties can verify that a user is legitimate and authenticate the user before providing charging services. Hence, the proposed protocol makes the charging service available in a secure way, while empowering users and preserving their privacy.
Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are an emerging solution to the issues of safe and sustainable transportation systems in the future. One major transport technology for CAVs is Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), for which unsignalized autonomous intersection crossing is a growing use case. CACC relies heavily on inter-vehicular communication and is thus vulnerable to message forgery and jamming attacks. Most solutions for CACC focus exclusively on enhancing efficiency or security but do not offer an integrated framework for achieving both on a large scale. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-integrated Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (Block-MADRL) architecture for enhancing the efficiency of CACC while cooperatively detecting attacks, reducing the fuel efficiency of identified attackers and securely notifying the overall network. Our approach uses multi-agent deep reinforcement learning to find fuel and throughput optimizing solutions for CACC and a cooperative verification mechanism based on Extended Isolation Forest (EIF) for attack detection. Attacker data is securely stored in a Road Side Unit (RSU) level blockchain, and we design a low-latency, high throughput consensus protocol for speedy and secure data dissemination. Simulation results indicate over 29.5% better lane throughput with our approach during acceleration forgery attack, up to 23% induced reduction in fuel efficiency of malicious vehicles, 17.6% higher blockchain throughput through our consensus protocol and over 8% improvement in attack detection rate compared to the state-of-the-art.
Tingting Xiao, Chen Chen, Qingqi Pei, Houbing Song
The rapid advancement of intelligent vehicles is deemed crucial to the emergence of diverse compute-intensive applications of assisted driving, which consist of automatic driving, speed recognition, hybrid sensing data fusion, etc. Nevertheless, resources-constraint vehicles with high mobility cannot always meet the computing and communication demands when the above applications occur. Additionally, considering the expensive and inflexible deployment of edge servers, offloading application tasks to âEdgeâ in the vehicular networks is not always working well. To effectively mitigate the above issues, the complicated application tasks are motivated to offload to the vehicle platoon, where the vehicles travel synchronously in a string with small headway. Benefiting from the stable connectivity, adjustable mobility, and reasonable charge, the task vehicle would like to process the task by leveraging the idle resources of each platoon member (PM). To make more effective use of the resources on the mobile edge platoon cloud (MEPC), we investigate the resource allocation strategy based on the task vehicleâs service pricing strategy in this work. We first formulate the interactions between MEPC and task vehicle as a Stackelberg game to study the joint utility maximization of the MEPC and task vehicle. Then the Stackelberg Equilibrium (SE) for the proposed game is characterized and proved. The proposed algorithm Hook-Jeeves-based Stackelberg game (HJSG) can reach the SE. Finally, we introduce the consortium blockchain to ensure the security and privacy of service transactions. The entire system helps enhance task processing efficiency, protect transaction data, and improve service experience. Experimental results over numerical simulation based on practical scenarios demonstrate that compared with Multi-round Stackelberg Game (MRSG), uniform pricing, and the local computation strategy, the proposed HJSG algorithm can attain less execution time and faster convergence performance.
Pouyan Razmjouei, Abdollah KavousiâFard, Morteza Dabbaghjamanesh, Tao Jin · 5 authors
This study proposes a novel secure and lightweight charging scheduling framework approach to provide the customization of edge computing services and personalized edge computing services for Moving EVs (MEVs) and Parking EVs (PEVs) in 6G heterogeneous Vehicular Networks (HetVNETs). A DAG-based smart-contract well-protected edge computing structural design is specially designed in the scheme by taking the wireless charging models into account including the attributes of 6G smart devices, where each vehicle network infrastructure copes with some more EVs in parking station wireless zone (PEVs) to make computing services whole through a wireless task. Each communication network handles a group of Electric Vehicles (EVs) in the parking zone to fulfill Cloud Computing Services (CCS) in wireless charging tasks. With this architecture, the collaborative computing resource allocation (CCRA) algorithm is developed to assist each network computing and communication hardware and software systems in deciding a customized service strategy (CSS) to fulfill the fast wireless charging and secure easy access of MEVs based on the widely available computational complexity solution held by various network infrastructures.
Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs), a special kind of Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs), play an important role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). Via wireless technology, vehicles exchange information related to road conditions and their status, and, thereby, VANETs enhance transportation safety and efficiency. A critical aspect of VANETs is providing privacy for the vehicles. The employment of pseudonym certificates is a well-known solution to the privacy problems in VANETs. However, certificate management faces challenges in renewing certificates and revoking vehicles. The centralized certificate management, especially resulting in the delay of the revocation process, harms the nodes of VANETs. This paper proposes a blockchain structure-based certificate management for VANETs and voting-based revocation to halt misbehaving vehiclesâ actions. Moreover, this paper presents extended privacy for the participants of the voting process using ring signatures.
Abstract The vision of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has acquired widespread acceptance as a result of the development of wireless technology. Its ability to provide drivers with various mobile services has made it an attractive application. Blockchain based security solution is considered good in various applications of IoV till now. But all the frameworks and architectures developed so far in IoV adopt the load of blockchain. So, it is generally deployed on or above edge computing devices, keeping lower structure of the frameworks traditional as managing blockchain with low computing devices on the physical layer is really a challenge. Securing communication in an IoV environment requires ensuring strong authentication and encryption. Although limited efforts are accessible for strong authentication and secure communication but, the lightweight characteristic is absent from this list. This article is proposing a lightweight secured framework for blockchain based IoV that offers strong authentication and secure communication. After securely authorization of the vehicle, it introduces the concept of branched blockchain taking into the consideration of most recently used block, so that the low powered devices can also adopt the security benefits of the blockchain. The existing mining systems are not designed to handle the needs of the IoV at the physical layer. Some of the key features of the proposed framework are lightweight blockchain for physical layer and above, load balancing, scalability, availability and decentralization. According to the relative research, which takes into account factors like computation and transmission costs, our suggested framework outperforms already implemented ones. This framework can act as base of new research verticals where anyone is looking forward for a lightweight blockchain variant applicable on physical layer of IoV.
Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Moayad Aloqaily, Fakhri Karray
The monumental growth in the frequency and sophistication of connected moving objects has led to a plethora of solutions to enable continuous, seamless, and reliable connectivity and service delivery. Connected, autonomous, and artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) moving devices are playing a significant role in the establishment of reliable wireless connectivity infrastructures for Beyond 5G (B5G) telecommunication networks. The advancements in ad hoc communication and moving platforms are now being recognized as alternative solutions toward connectivity in many complex environments for applications, such as autonomous transportation and robotics. Todayâs availability of AI-enabled moving devices, incorporating advanced processing and communication capabilities, together with advanced decentralization-enabling technologies, such as intelligent blockchain, provide alternatives to autonomy for moving platforms in smart cities. In this article, we discuss recent advances in moving IoT devices, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), that adapt intelligent connectivity support, data collection, decision making, and blockchain technology to facilitate autonomous configurability and service provisioning for IoT networks.
Qian Mei, Hu Xiong, Yeh-Cheng Chen, ChienâMing Chen
In this article, we propose a secure and effective blockchain-enabled privacy-preserving authentication scheme for the transportation cyber-physical system (CPS) with the cloud-edge computing environment, which supports unconditional anonymity and data batch integrity verification while greatly simplifying key management issues. The proposed privacy-preserving authentication scheme employs an elliptic curve to construct a pairing-free ring signature scheme, which greatly reduces the resources overhead in the transportation CPS with cloud-edge computing. Moreover, the authentication process is performed on the blockchain to provide more reliable service information for vehicular communication. Furthermore, the security proof of the scheme is demonstrated based on the elliptic curve discrete logarithm problem under the random oracle model, and gives the corresponding security analysis. Finally, a simulation experiment demonstrates that the proposed scheme is feasible compared with the existing schemes.
Abdulghafour Mohammad, Sergio Vargas, Pavel ÄermĂĄk
Todayâs cars can share data with other cars, automakers, and service providers. Shared data can help improve the driving experience, the performance of the car, and the traffic situations. Among all data-collection techniques, blockchain technology offers an immutable and secure solution to support data collection in the automotive industry. Despite its advantages, collecting auto data with blockchain still faces several challenges. Thus, the purpose of this study was to conduct a review of published articles that have addressed the challenges of adopting blockchain for data collection in the automotive industry. This paper allowed us to answer the predefined research question: âWhat are the challenges of using blockchain for data collection in the automotive industry as presented in the published literature?â The review included articles published from 2017 to January 2022, and from the screened records, 13 articles were analyzed in full-text form. The founded challenges were categorized into seven categories: connectivity, privacy, security attacks, scalability, performance, costs, and monetizing. This review will help researchers, car manufacturers, and third-party suppliers to assess the applicability of the blockchain for data collection.