Blockchain Papers

Cheng Gong, Ling Xiong, He Xingyu, Xianhua Niu

No abstract is available for this record.

Prabhat Kumar, Randhir Kumar, Govind P. Gupta, Rakesh Tripathi

Green Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) are the future of next-generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) that will help humans to improve road safety and reduce pollution, energy consumption, and travel delays. To increase the performance of green CAV, the data generated by Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and associated infrastructure needs to be processed in real-time. Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) is a promising paradigm that can be integrated with green CAV to save energy and to improve the network performance in terms of low latency for data processing. However, MEC servers and other communication entities in green CAV environment cannot be fully trusted and may bring vulnerabilities related to data privacy and security. Motivated by the above challenges, we design a blockchain and Deep-Learning (DL)-enabled secure data processing framework for an edge-envisioned green CAV environment (hereafter referred to as BDEdge). In blockchain-based scheme, all communication entities are registered, verified and thereafter validated using smart contract-based Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm. The authenticated data is forwarded to DL scheme. In DL-based scheme, an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) based on a hybrid model of Sparse Auto-Encoder-enabled Attention Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Unit (SAE-ABIGRU) is designed by analyzing the link load behaviors of the MEC-enabled Road Side Unit (RSU) server. The security analysis and comparative simulation findings shows that the proposed BDEdge framework can significantly reduce false alarm rate and increase accuracy close to 99%.

Cheng Xu, Hongjun Wu, Hongzhe Liu, Weihao Gu · 6 authors

The Internet of Vehicles is the specific instantiation of the Internet of Things in the field of transportation. Vehicle and driving data are often used to mine information about people’s lifestyles and preferences. Without advanced data encryption and strict authorization measures, personal privacy and security are at great risk. To solve the problem that the relatively low security of vehicles connected to the Internet may threaten the privacy of users, a blockchain-based sensitive data privacy-protection scheme for vehicles connected to the Internet is proposed. First, association rules are used to mine Big Data in the Internet of Vehicles. Then, a data security aggregation protocol is established. Finally, an end-to-end encryption mechanism is created. The privacy protection of Big Data in the Internet of Vehicles is achieved through static and dynamic strategies. The experimental results show that the scheme can improve the hiding rate of sensitive data, the key generation time and encryption time are shorter than those of typical technologies, and the encryption ability is better. Therefore, in protecting the privacy of Big Data in the Internet of Vehicles, the blockchain proposed in this paper has better privacy protection and encryption abilities and is applicable to the protection of sensitive data in the Internet of Vehicles.

Ming Jiang, Xingsheng Qin

Abstract Blockchain-based systems, coined by distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), have rapidly received tremendous interest from academia, industries, and governments. Recent literature has revealed many research and developments on applying DLTs to the Internet of things (IoT), cloud-edge computing. In this survey, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the newly appeared concepts, theories, platforms, and DLTs-facilitated applications of vehicular networks and mobile edge computing (MEC). We also review the selections of the available DLTs related platforms and tools. Future research directions and issues are discussed, including security, privacy, scalability issues, and multiple applications in various domains.

Ashish Tomar, Sachin Tripathi

No abstract is available for this record.

Lokendra Vishwakarma, Ankur Nahar, Debasis Das

The development of modern software-defined networking (SDN) solutions brings new opportunities in Internet-of-Vehicles (IoVs). However, the autonomous nature of the vehicular environment leads to unpredictable security vulnerabilities and reliability issues. The high computation overhead and storage requirements also pose a significant challenge in message dissemination. To overcome these issues, we introduce a lightweight blockchain-based security protocol for secure communication and storage in SDN-enabled IoV, known as LBSV. The LBSV is a permissioned blockchain network that uses the proposed modified practical byzantine fault tolerance (mPBFT) consensus algorithm. Additionally, the SDN-enabled network exploits the blockchain framework and schedules different procedures. The secure message dissemination is achieved through various cryptographic functions (i.e., elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and the secure hash algorithm (SHA256)). The security analysis shows that the LBSV withstands various cyberattacks regarding message dissemination privacy. The experimental results show that LBSV provides high performance with 85% less computational cost, 55% less storage and communication overhead and 90% less consensus delay compared with state-of-the-art schemes.

Xuehan Li, Tao Jing, Ruinian Li, Hui Li · 6 authors

In vehicularad hocnetworks (VANETs), road safety and road traffic efficiency can be improved through message interaction between vehicle users, which inevitably relies on secure identity authentication, and message credibility verification. Existing authentication and message verification mechanisms are prone to severe single points of failure and low authentication efficiency due to their reliance on the trusted third party, especially during the user registration phase. This article proposes a double-layer blockchain and decentralized identifiers assisted secure registration and authentication (BDRA) mechanism for decentralized VANETs, which can achieve the following advantages: 1) realizing a secure and decentralized user registration phase by using the decentralized identifier (DID) technology; 2) accomplishing efficient authentication and message verification by combining double-layer blockchain, DIDs and a reputation feedback strategy; and 3) enabling a more efficient cross section reregistration that reduces the communication time by 30%. The security features and efficiency of the BDRA mechanism are demonstrated by carrying out security analysis and performance evaluation, which is based on the hyperledger fabric (HLF) platform.

Kashif Naseer Qureshi, Gwanggil Jeon, Mohammad Mehedi Hassan, Md. Rafiul Hassan · 5 authors

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have gained popularity due to smart services and applications to facilitate the users on the roads. The increasing growth of users in these networks created new and complex data processing, storage, security, and privacy concerns. These networks are using centralized edge, fog, or cloud architecture for data management. User privacy is compromised in these networks due to the increasing demands and service provider’s services. To ensure the data privacy, the centralized architectures are used without privacy regulations. In this paper, we present a Blockchain-based Privacy-Preserving Authentication (BPPAU) model for ITS networks to ensures users privacy and security. The proposed model provides data storage, data accessing, and processing management by using a blockchain smartcontract system, access control policy and on demand based functions. The proposed model is tested in a simulation environment to check its performance in terms of transaction cost with data size, transaction per second analysis with block time, and computational time analysis with several transactions.

Yi Yang, Debiao He, Pandi Vijayakumar, Brij B. Gupta · 5 authors

Maritime transportation has ushered in a period of vigorous development and has been the most critical mode of transport in international trade. Maritime communication is also becoming increasingly complex. This trend needs the IoT-enabled Maritime Transportation System (IMTS) to enhance its ability of privacy-preserving, performance continuously, and add the function of joint management. Although many aggregate signcryption (ASC) schemes have been presented to satisfy this requirement, they still suffer from performance deficiencies or security weaknesses. To address these issues, we design a more practical “Perception-Network-Application” IoT-enabled MTS (PNA-IMTS) network structure. Then, we propose an efficient Identity-based aggregate signcryption scheme with blockchain (B-ID-ASC) for PNA-IMTS based on this network model. The security analysis shows that the B-ID-ASC scheme is capable of providing confidentiality and unforgeability. It also can resist existing known attacks (impersonation attack, modification attack, man-in-the-middle attack). The performance analysis indicates that our B-ID-ASC scheme, having lower computation and communication costs than current ASC schemes, is more applicable for PNA-IMTS.

Sudan Jha, Nishant Jha, Deepak Prashar, Sultan Ahmad · 6 authors

Autonomous vehicles offer various advantages to both vehicle owners and automobile companies. However, despite the advantages, there are various risks associated with these vehicles. These vehicles interact with each other by forming a vehicular network, also known as VANET, in a centralized manner. This centralized network is vulnerable to cyber-attacks which can cause data loss, resulting in road accidents. Thus, to prevent the vehicular network from being attacked and to prevent the privacy of the data, key management is used. However, key management alone over a centralized network is not effective in ensuring data integrity in a vehicular network. To resolve this issue, various studies have introduced a blockchain-based approach and enabled key management over a decentralized network. This technique is also found effective in ensuring the privacy of all the stakeholders involved in a vehicular network. Furthermore, a blockchain-based key management system can also help in storing a large amount of data over a distributed network, which can encourage a faster exchange of information between vehicles in a network. However, there are certain limitations of blockchain technology that may affect the efficient working of autonomous vehicles. Most of the existing blockchain-based systems are implemented over Ethereum or Bitcoin. The transaction-processing capability of these blockchains is in the range of 5 to 20 transactions per second, whereas hashgraphs are capable of processing thousands of transactions per second as the data are processed exponentially. Furthermore, a hashgraph prevents the user from altering the order of the transactions being processed, and they do not need high computational powers to operate, which may help in reducing the overall cost of the system. Due to the advantages offered by a hashgraph, an advanced key management framework based on a hashgraph for secure communication between the vehicles is suggested in this paper. The framework is developed using the concept of Leaving of Vehicles based on a Logical Key Hierarchy (LKH) and Batch Rekeying. The system is tested and compared with other closely related systems on the basis of the transaction compilation time and change in traffic rates.

Muhammad Saad, Muhammad Khalid Khan, Maaz Bin Ahmad

This systematic literature review provides an extensive categorization of the blockchain-enabled applications across the domain of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Within the paradigm of distributed ledger technology (DLT), the communication models and practices for VANETs have been revolutionized. An analytical review and a survey were conducted to explore the advancements of blockchain and VANETs. The techniques, limitations, and advantages of blockchain deployment in VANETs are discussed for the effective implementation of a decentralized network. To this end, 68 studies were selected on the basis of the procedural steps to provide a comprehensive overview of blockchain and the smart contracts in VANETs. In particular, a decentralized communication model is also proposed for the advanced implementation of blockchain in VANETs. Researchers and practitioners are being attracted to these technologies for applications for various industrial sectors. Therefore, this study also emphasizes the identification of any blockchain-related open issues for future prospects. The comprehension of blockchain applications for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is also explored in order to fill the research gap on advanced communication networks across the Internet of Things.

Atul Lal Shrivastava, Rajendra Kumar Dwivedi

These days, Internet of Things (IoT) is widely used in several real-life applications viz., smart agriculture, smart city, smart healthcare, and smart vehicles. Smart vehicles are interconnected and deliver a variety of sophisticated services to their owners, transit authorities, automobile manufacturers, and other service providers. Smart cars could be exposed to a number of security and privacy risks, including Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking and remote vehicle hijacking. In vehicular IoT, a variety of data are stored in cloud and any alteration in data can cause major road accidents. Blockchain is an evolving technology that can be used for security using decentralization and smart contracts. It is a viable solution for implementing security in vehicular IoTs. In this paper, we presented a blockchain-based methodology to preserve users' privacy while simultaneously boosting vehicle security. The proposed methodology keeps the vehicle data at the servers and related hash values are stored in the blockchain. Thus, the proposed model offers security using decentralization of data. This method outperforms the existing methods in terms of security as well as efficiency.

He Xingyu, Xianhua Niu, Yangpeng Wang, Ling Xiong · 6 authors

Through information sharing, vehicles can know the surrounding road condition information timely in Vehicular Adhoc Networks. To ensure the validity of these messages and the security of vehicles, the message authentication, privacy-preserving, and delay problems are three important issues. Although many conditional privacy-preserving authentication schemes have been proposed to ensure secure communication, there still exist some imperfections such as frequent interactions or unlinkability. From this, our paper proposes a novel hierarchical blockchain-assisted authentication scheme to solve these existing issues comprehensively. First, unlinkability is achieved by a dynamic key derivation algorithm. Second, the proposed scheme can reduce correlation processing delay, queuing delay, and deployment costs by adopting hierarchical Vehicle Fog Computing. Third, cross-region authentication is achieved by taking advantage of the properties of blockchain. In addition, we demonstrate our scheme can fulfill the security criteria of the Vehicular Adhoc Network by security analysis. Furthermore, the simulations are carried out to show its availability by using JAVA and NS-3. The findings reveal that the suggested method outperforms earlier schemes in terms of computation cost and communication cost. All in all, making the authentication scheme more efficient and concise is the focus of our future research.

Tahani Gazdar, Ohoud Alboqomi, Asmaa Munshi

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are one of the pillars of the Internet of Vehicles, they provide plenty of applications ranging from safety to entertainment. Safety applications largely depend on reliable and authentic traffic-related data. However, ensuring the data reliability and authenticity is facing many challenges due mainly to the scalability of VANETs such as the high speed, the long roads, and the open nature of VANETs. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing a decentralized Blockchain-based trust management framework (BC-TMF) aiming to compute trust metrics for vehicles. These trust metrics rely on the authenticity of the messages. Each vehicle assesses the authenticity of the received messages in real-time, calculates a local trust metric for the originator of such messages, then shares it with a miner. Periodically each miner aggregates the received trust metrics into global trust metrics, then packs them in a block. To investigate the efficiency and consistency of the proposed framework, extensive simulations are conducted. The obtained results show that the proposed BC-TMF has an excellent capability in computing accurate trust metrics for vehicles. Besides, it outperforms the existing ones in terms of the accuracy of computed trust metrics, particularly for malicious vehicles.

Xin Lu, Zhijun Wu

The air traffic management (ATM) system is an intelligent system that integrates the ground computer network, the airborne network, and the space satellite (communication and navigation) network. It has remarkable characteristics of cyber-physical system (CPS). The development of ATM system is inseparable from the application of new technologies. This paper proposes a security framework based on blockchain for CPS in the ATM system. Through the research on the characteristics of blockchain and CPS, this paper analyzes the necessity of integrating them into the research of the ATM system, demonstrates the feasibility of combining them, and then constructs the ATMChain framework mechanism to realize the in-depth integration of blockchain and CPS in ATM. On this basis, this paper gives the overall design architecture and implementation steps of the scheme. In addition, this paper also makes a series of analysis and demonstration from the perspective of scheme security. The research scheme will help to improve the security, reliability, and scalability of ATM services and provide a new reference for establishing a more security and efficient ATM system.

Chen Chen, Quan Shi

With the rapid development of the informatization and industrialization of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the number and application of connected vehicles are growing rapidly. The safety problem is related to the property and life of human beings, which has attracted extensive attention from academic and industrial circles. Based on the study of high-quality literature published in the past decade and other high-level research works, this paper first analyzes the forms of attack against the Internet of Vehicles from the two aspects of attack mode and target. Then, it summarizes the existing blockchain-based system framework of the Internet of Vehicles (BIoV) and then discusses the security solutions of blockchain-based vehicles from the aspects of authentication, privacy, trust management, access control, and so on, to support the distributed system architecture and solve the security challenges of the Internet of Vehicles. Finally, the technical difficulties and the direction of further research of BIoV are summarized.

Yue Su, Kien Nguyen, Hiroo Sekiya

When deploying the IoT-Blockchain system on an infrastructure-based network (e.g., Wi-Fi), we will face the single point of failure problem (e.g., failure of an access point harm the whole system). Using ad-hoc routing protocols can avoid such a problem, and the system can recover the communication automatically if an IoT device fails. This paper investigates the recovery time of two routing protocols (i.e., Optimized Link State Routing (OLSR) and a Better Approach To Mobile Ad-hoc Network (BATMAN)) in an IoT-Blockchain system after a network failure happened without and with a blockchain connection. We have used mininet-wifi and private Ethereum blockchain to build the IoT-Blockchain, where we deployed the two routing protocols. The evaluation results show that the performance of BATMAN is better than OLSR’s. Specifically, the recovery time of BATMAN is 8.485, 7.355 seconds faster than OLSR when not having and having a blockchain connection, respectively.

Mohammad Ilbeigi, Azita Morteza, Ramtin Ehsani

Reliable communication is a critical component of a successful emergency management operation in resilient cities. However, large-scale extreme events may demolish telecommunication infrastructure. The current state of practice to maintain communication when telecom infrastructure are not available heavily depend on expensive equipment (e.g., transportable telecom towers and unmanned aerial networks) that may not be readily available everywhere. To address this issue, this study aims to develop theoretical foundations for a new framework that provides a fully decentralized infrastructure-less communication system using ad hoc mobile networks. The proposed framework uses device-to-device (D2D) wireless connection, distributed ledgers adopted from Blockchain technology, and a new all-to-all network broadcasting algorithm. The proposed infrastructure-less system collects critical spatial data from available cellphone devices in the affected area and shares it among all of them. At the end of this procedure, each device will have spatial information of all available devices. When emergency teams find a device through a D2D connection, they will actually have access to spatial data of all devices and can locate all people in one step.

Minghui Dai, Tianshun Wang, Yang Li, Yuan Wu · 6 authors

The wide use of unmanned aerial vehicles provides a promising paradigm for improving air-ground services and applications (e.g., urban sensing, disaster relief) in air-ground integrated networks (AGINs). Digital twin (DT), which is an emerging technology that utilizes data, models, and intelligent algorithms to integrate cyber physical networks and digital virtual models, provides a real-time and dynamic simulation platform for strategy optimization and decision making in AGINs. Due to the openness and massive connectivity of AGINs, the security and reliability services in this system become an important issue. In this article, we investigate the DT envisioned secure federated aerial learning for AGINs via an aerial blockchain approach. Specifically, we propose a layered framework of DT envisioned AGINs, which comprises the construction segment, communication segment, aggregation segment, analysis segment, and operation segment. Based on this framework, we offer the applications of the proposed DT envisioned AGINs. To guarantee the security of data transmission in AGINs, we investigate the aerial blockchain-based approach for ensuring data security. Furthermore, we provide a case study of DT envisioned secure federated aerial computing in AGINs to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach through designing the aerial blockchain and training model.

Swapna Choudhary, Sanjay Dorle

Vehicular Ad-hoc networks (VANETs) during the communication process, nodes are always varying and the process is always under security threats like Sybil attacks, masquerading attacks, etc. In order to reduce the probability of these attacks and to regulate traffic flow in the network, a software-defined network (SDN) is used. The SDN is used for implementing protocols like OpenFlow and reducing the routing load in the network, but it doesn’t provide a high level of security to the network, hence protocols like encryption, hashing, etc. are applied to the VANET. In the paper, SDN based blockchain-inspired algorithm is implemented, which coordinates network traffic and improves the overall security of the network. Security analysis of the proposed algorithm shows that the combination of blockchain with encrypted SDN is removing more than 95% of the network attacks as compared to its non-blockchain counterparts.

Waheeb Ahmed, Di Wu, Daniel Mukathe

Abstract Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are characterized by high mobility of nodes and volatility, which make privacy, trust management, and security challenging issues in VANETs' design. In such networks, data can be exposed to a variety of attacks, the most dangerous is false information dissemination, which threatens the safety and efficiency of transportation systems. False emergency messages can be injected by inside attackers to announce fake incidents such as traffic accidents, resulting in a false information attack. As the data in VANET is based on events, any trust mechanism must first identify the true events. To address these security challenges, a blockchain‐based authentication scheme and trust management model are proposed for VANETs. Using the authentication scheme, vehicles are enabled to send messages anonymously to the roadside units (RSUs) and the identity privacy of vehicles is protected. Besides, the proposed trust management model is designed to detect and deal with false information by evaluating the trustworthiness of vehicles and data. Using the trust model, when vehicles report an incident to the nearest RSU, the RSU is able to verify whether or not the incident took place. This mechanism ensures that RSUs send only verified event notifications. Finally, RSUs participate in updating the trust values of vehicles and store these values in the blockchain. The efficiency of the proposed authentication scheme is validated through analysis while the trust model is validated through simulations. The results obtained show that the proposed authentication scheme and the trust model provide better performance than other state‐of‐the‐art models where malicious vehicles can be identified efficiently and RSUs are enabled to broadcast only legitimate events.

Mohammad Wazid, Basudeb Bera, Ashok Kumar Das, Saraju P. Mohanty · 5 authors

Smart vehicles-enabled intelligent transportation system (ITS) supports a wide range of applications, such as, but not limited to, traffic planning and management, collision avoidance alert system, automated road speed enforcement, electronic toll collection, and real-time parking management, to name a few. However, it suffers from various types of security and privacy issues due to insecure communication among the entities over public channels. Therefore, an efficient and lightweight security mechanism is essential to protect the data that is both at rest as well as in transit. To this direction, we propose a public blockchain-envisioned secure communication framework for ITS (PBSCF-ITS). The proposed PBSCF-ITS guarantees access control and key management among the vehicle to vehicle, vehicle to roadside unit, and roadside unit to cloud server. We analyze the security of PBSCF-ITS to prove its resilience against various types of possible attacks. Furthermore, the performance of PBSCF-ITS with other related competing schemes has been compared. The obtained results illustrate that PBSCF-ITS outperforms the existing ones. Additionally, the pragmatic study of PBSCF-ITS is conducted to check its influence on various network-related performance parameters, like the number of mined blocks and transactions per block.

Azees Maria, Arun Sekar Rajasekaran, Fadi Al-Turjman, Chadi Altrjman · 5 authors

Recent development in intelligent transport systems (ITS) has led to the improvement of driving experience in vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) systems. Providing a low computational cost with high serving capability, however, is a critical phenomenon in the current VANET system. In the existing scenario, when the authenticated vehicle user moves from one roadside unit (RSU) to another RSU region, re-authentication of the vehicle user is required by the current RSU, which increases the computational complexity. To overcome the above-mentioned challenge, a blockchain-based authentication protocol is developed in this work. In this suggested process, blockchain is integrated with VANET, which enables the authentication of the vehicle user without the involvement of a trusted authority. Moreover, the integrity of the message and privacy of vehicle users are preserved in the blockchain network. Even though many blockchain-based schemes have been proposed recently, the existing schemes were not focused on conditional anonymity. However, in our proposed scheme, conditional privacy is introduced to revoke the malicious vehicles in the case of disputes and to avoid further damage to the VANET system. As a result, the proposed scheme provides an efficient mechanism for anonymous authentication, privacy, and integrity preservation with conditional tracking. Finally, the defense against different security threats is explained in the security analysis section, and the performance investigation section shows the competence and efficacy of our method with similar related methods.

Guangquan Xu, Hongpeng Bai, Jun Xing, Tao Luo · 8 authors

No abstract is available for this record.