In Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), privacy protection and data security during network transmission and data analysis have attracted attention. In this paper, we apply deep learning, blockchain, and fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) technologies in VANETs and propose a Decentralized Privacy-preserving Deep Learning (DPDL) model. We propose a Decentralized VANETs (DVANETs) architecture, where computing tasks are decomposed from centralized cloud services to edge computing (EC) nodes, thereby effectively reducing network communication overhead and congestion delay. We use blockchain to establish a secure and trusted data communication mechanism among vehicles, roadside units, and EC nodes. In addition, we propose a DPDL model to provide privacy-preserving data analysis for DVANET, where the FHE algorithm is used to encrypt the transportation data on each EC node and input it into the local DPDL models, thereby effectively protecting the privacy and credibility of vehicles. Moreover, we further use blockchain to provide a decentralized and trusted DPDL model update mechanism, where the parameters of each local DPDL model are stored in the blockchain for sharing with other distributed models. In this way, all distributed models can update their models in a credible and asynchronous manner, avoiding possible threats and attacks. Extensive simulations are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness, practicality, and robustness of the proposed DVANET system and DPDL models.
Li Zhu, Hao Liang, Hongwei Wang, Bin Ning · 5 authors
The communication-based train control (CBTC) system ensures the high efficiency and orderliness of trains and is widely used in urban rail transit networks. The adoption of wireless communication and network techniques makes the CBTC systems more vulnerable to cyber attacks. Identity authentication is an effective approach to improve system security. The existing identity authentication mechanisms in CBTC adopt a centralized key management system sensitive to single-point failures. To improve system security, in this article, we deploy a blockchain in CBTC systems. The client that runs the blockchain program not only acts as blockchain nodes to provide distributed key management for the CBTC system but they also work as a relay node to authenticate the communication between train control nodes in CBTC systems. Based on the blockchain-empowered distributed security scheme, the block producer selection and onboard blockchain client handoff decision problem are studied. With the objective to minimize the impact of the key updating process on CBTC system performance and keep the system security under a reasonable level, we formulate the block producer selection and onboard blockchain client handoff decision problem using the deep reinforcement learning approach. Extensive simulation results illustrate that the proposed blockchain-empowered security scheme can significantly improve the CBTC system security, and CBTC systems need to sacrifice part performance to ensure system security.
Vehicular ad-hoc network enhances driving safety and enables various intelligent transportation applications by adopting the revolutionary vehicular wireless communication technology. This has attracted a lot of attentions from both academia and industry in recent years. Given the sophistication of vehicular manufacturing and the heterogeneity of intelligent transport terminals, performing vehicular authentication is of great importance. The existing schemes have largely considered vehicle security and authentication within a single administrative domain, which lacks supervision of the authority and entity in the intelligent transportation system. In this article, we propose a multidomain vehicular authentication architecture by introducing blockchain technique to build distributed trust and share cross-domain information among multiple administrative domains. To guarantee the anonymity and traceability, a pseudonym-based privacy-preserving authentication method is proposed. Specifically, considering the supervision of authority and the resilience to key escrow, we design a two-phase pseudonym distribution mechanism with the assistance of a roadside unit (RSU) proxy. We conduct in-depth security analysis by comparing with existing works and deploy experiments to show the efficiency and feasibility of the proposed scheme in the multidomain scenario.
With recent developments in communication technologies, vehicular networks have become a reality with various applications. However, the cybersecurity aspect of vehicular networks is still an open issue that needs to be addressed with novel defence mechanisms against attacks. This paper first presents the state-of-the-art communication technologies in vehicular networks (either inter-vehicle networking or in-vehicle networking) along with their applications. Then we explore novel technologies including machine learning and blockchain as cybersecurity defence mechanisms in vehicular networks. Based on the extensive survey, we highlight some insights for future research to secure vehicular networks.
M. Satheesh Kumar, S. Vimal, N. Z. Jhanjhi, Shanmuga Sundar Dhanabalan · 5 authors
With the prevalence of Aerospace Technologies, the regulations of cybersecurity are becoming smarter, assured, and long-lasting. Modern communication network technologies have enormous growth in the cyber threats and masquerading attacks to steal data. Hence concepts and mechanisms are built and made into regulations for a safer environment. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), often known as drones, are becoming increasingly common, posing new problems in areas such as monitoring, agriculture, weather prediction, surveillance and other fields. This includes a large number of devices that, owing to a lack of energy or a system shutdown, might occasionally send incorrect signals and must be monitored autonomously by drones in remote regions. In this paper, we propose a energy intensive blockchain-based platform for controlling drone operations while ensuring trust and security for all parties involved. The goal of this paper is to explore the extent of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) vulnerability to deceptive (Global Navigation Satellite System) GNSS signals by establishing the necessary conditions for UAV via GPS (Global Positioning System) spoofing. The existing algorithms used to mitigate spoofing attacks have unbounded long-term errors, which increase in time during its performance. An innovative idea is necessitating to eliminate those errors, thereby in the proposed work, Ethereum Blockchain has been implemented to create a blockchain network to mitigate the spoofing attacks. Blockchains are incredibly popular nowadays and is the basic technology for cryptocurrencies. Blockchain technology greatly impacts the applications in UAVs. The proposed methodology uses the network that has to be registered in the aerospace components through the ledger associated with relevant data communication in the Blockchain. When an intruder gets acquired with the data in the network with a single block, it cannot affect the entire network due to the data integrity in the ledgers that has been cryptographically assigned. The blockchain network intermittently verifies the geolocation data so that any outlying data would be detected and eliminated quickly. The data that has been verified is made available for the view of aviation and spacecraft operations through the distributed network. The proposed methodology outperforms the existing methods in intense drift error and, in the case of confidentiality and integrity, it has very low risk when compared to existing methods.
Moayad Aloqaily, Ismaeel Al Ridhawi, Mohsen Guizani
The aerial capabilities and flexibility in movement of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has enabled them to adaptively provide both traditional and more contemporary services. In this article, we introduce a solution that integrates the capabilities of both UAVs and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) to provide both intelligent connectivity and services to both aerial and ground connected devices. A cooperative solution is adopted that considers nodes’ power and movement constraints. The UAV and UGV cooperative process ensures continuous power availability to UAVs to support seamless and continuous service availability to end-devices. A Federated Learning (FL) approach is adopted at the edge to ensure accurate and up-to-date service provisioning in accordance with the surrounding environment and network constraints. Moreover, Blockchain technology is used to decentralize the provisioning and control aspects, and ensure authenticity and integrity. Extensive simulations are conducted to test the soundness and applicability of the proposed solution. Results show significant improvement in terms of connectivity, service availability, and UAV energy enhancements when compared to traditional mobile and vehicular communication techniques.
Petr Dzurenda, Carles Anglés Tafalla, Sara Ricci, Lukáš Malina
This work presents a complex privacy-preserving solution based on attribute-based credentials and smart contract techniques for emerging parking services in city zones. Our system provides the full set of privacy-enhancing features such as anonymity, untraceability, and unlinkability of user parking registrations. Thanks to that it prevents the city and service providers from profiling and tracking the users (e.g., their movement). Furthermore, we involved smart contracts and the underlying decentralized Blockchain technology in payment and verification phases to prevent the presence of a single point of failure in those processes which can endanger the system’s security and availability. We provide the full cryptographic specification of the system, its security analysis, and the implementation results in this paper.
The amount of information generated grows as more and more sensor and IoT devices are deployed in smart cities. It is of utmost importance for us to consider the privacy data leakage and compromised identity from both outside adversaries and inside abuse of data access privilege. The security assumption of the system should not solely rely on the fact that permission and access control were being implemented correctly. Quite the contrary, a system can be designed in a way that user's identity data and usage traces are not leaked even if the system had been compromised. Based upon our previous on-street parking system utilizing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons, we applied a cryptographic primitive called zero-knowledge proof to our authentication system. A commitment scheme and Merkle tree is combined in the setup to achieve zero-knowledge set membership proof. Doing so, the user is anonymous to the server between authentication sessions, while the server's still able to verify the legitimacy of such user. The on-street parking system is therefore immune to privacy data leakage, as for now one cannot mass-query and profile certain user's traces within the system.
Obtaining timely and accurate traffic information is one of the most important problems in intelligent transportation system, which will make vehicles run smoothly, avoid road congestion, save road running time and reduce vehicle energy consumption. In the current Internet of Vehicles system, the traffic management center can learn from the feedback information of all vehicles to improve the ability of decision-making and traffic command. However, the existing feedback mechanism does not respond to the spatial-temporal characteristics of data in time, due to the lack of communication capability of the current equipment. So, it cannot meet the requirements of ultra-low delay, high reliability and high security in the Internet of Vehicles. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a blockchain-based proxy vote and revocation scheme for decision feedback in Internet of Vehicles, which allows the intelligent system to ignore the unevenness and heterogeneity in the 6G technology. In addition, blockchain technology notarizes the vote data of vehicles and outsources microservices. Secondly, we use the attributes of decision-related nodes instead of their identities to enable anonymous vote. Smart contracts can automatically expand the scalability of outsourced microservices. Finally, the security proof of the proposed scheme ensures the security and consistency of outsourced microservices. The simulation results also show that our scheme greatly improves the efficiency of voting feedback.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) is a promising technology that aims to improve the traditional transport management systems. In C-ITS infrastructure Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) communicate wirelessly with other AVs, Road Side Units (RSUs) and Traffic Command Centres (TCCs) using an open channel Internet. However, the use of the Internet brings inherent vulnerabilities related to privacy (e.g., adversary performing inference and data poisoning attacks), and security (e.g., AVs can be compromised using advanced hacking techniques) issues and prevents the faster realization of C-ITS applications. To address these challenges, this paper presents a privacy-preserving-based secure framework to provide both privacy and security in C-ITS infrastructure. The proposed framework provides two level of security and privacy using blockchain and deep learning modules. First, a blockchain module is designed to securely transmit the C-ITS data between AVs–RSUs-TCCs, and a smart contract-based enhanced Proof of Work (ePoW) technique is designed to verify data integrity and mitigate data poisoning attacks. Second, a deep-learning module is designed that includes Long-Short Term Memory-AutoEncoder (LSTM-AE) technique for encoding C-ITS data into a new format to prevent inference attacks. The encoded data is used by the proposed Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network (A-RNN), for intrusive events recognition in C-ITS infrastructure. The proposed A-RNN is trained using Truncated Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) algorithm. The framework is further validated and tested using two publicly available ToN-IoT and CICIDS-2017 datasets. The proposed framework is compared with peer privacy-preserving intrusion detection techniques, and the result shows the effectiveness of the proposed framework over several state-of-the-art techniques in both blockchain and non-blockchain systems.
Nikhil Ravi, Sahil Verma, Kavita Kavita, N. Z. Jhanjhi · 5 authors
Abstract VANET permits communication from V2V or in this specific communication which is generated by the vehicle. Because of this to a broad range of technologies and facilities, like protection for travelers, improved traffic capacity, and infotainment, It’s has been closely researched. In this paper, we implement the algorithm for security while rewarded will be added to the client. we also analyze the VANET through the blockchain technologies and IOV with blockchain. IOV has improved traffic safety. A period now is ripening for paving the way for a new wave of autonomous cars with modern technologies and creative protection initiatives by integrating smart cars on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV).
Hassan Farran, David Khoury, Elie Kfoury, László Bokor
The security proposed for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) systems in the European Union is specified in the ETSI Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) standards, and related documents are based on the trusted PKI/CAs. The C-ITS trust model platform comprises an EU Root CA and additional Root CAs run in Europe by member state authorities or private organizations offering certificates to individual users. A new method is described in this paper where the security in V2X is based on the Distributed Public Keystore (DPK) platform developed for Ethereum blockchain. The V2X security is considered as one application of the DPK platform. The DPK stores and distributes the vehicles, RSUs, or other C-ITS role-players’ public keys. It establishes a generic key exchange/ agreement scheme that provides mutual key, entity authentication, and distributing a session key between two peers. V2X communication based on this scheme can establish an end-to-end (e2e) secure session and enables vehicle authentication without the need for a vehicle certificate signed by a trusted Certificate Authority.
In distributed environments, such as distributed ledgers technologies and other peer-to-peer architectures, communication represents a crucial topic. The ability to efficiently disseminate contents is strongly influenced by the type of system architecture, the protocol used to spread such contents over the network and the actual dynamicity of the communication links (i.e. static vs. temporal nets). In particular, the dissemination strategies either focus on achieving an optimal coverage, minimizing the network traffic or providing assurances on anonymity (that is a fundamental requirement of many cryptocurrencies). In this work, the behaviour of multiple dissemination protocols is discussed and studied through simulation. The performance evaluation has been carried out on temporal networks with the help of LUNES-temporal, a discrete event simulator that allows to test algorithms running on a distributed environment. The experiments show that some gossip protocols allow to either save a considerable number of messages or to provide better anonymity guarantees, at the cost of a little lower coverage achieved and/or a little increase of the delivery time.
Due to the distributed and dynamic characteristics of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and the continuous growth in the number of devices, content-centric decentralized vehicular named data networking (VNDN) has become more suitable for content-oriented applications in IoV. However, the existing centralized architecture is prone to the failure of single points, which results in trust problems in key verification between cross-domain nodes and consuming more power and reducing the lifetime. Focusing on secure key management and power-efficient routing, this article proposes a blockchain-based key management and green routing scheme for VNDN. A blockchain-based key management scheme is presented to achieve secure and efficient distribution and verification of keys. Specifically, all trusted agencies (TAs) form a consortium blockchain for storing public key hashes to ensure the authenticity of users’ public keys. A green global routing scheme based on node relaying pressure (GGNRP) is proposed to save power consumption and reduce the forwarding delay. A new node relay pressure metric is introduced to assist with routing decisions. Detailed experiments and analysis show that, compared with the existing scheme, the proposed scheme can achieve secure key management and GGNRP can decrease the power consumption and average delay by 15.8% and 63.2%, respectively.
Le concept de villes intelligentes gagne de plus en plus en importance dans les métropoles modernes en raison de l’émergence et de la diffusion d’appareils, de systèmes et de technologies intelligents embarqués et connectés dans la vie quotidienne, qui ont créé l’opportunité de connecter chaque “chose" à Internet. Dans l'ère à venir de l'Internet des objets, l'Internet des véhicules (IoV) jouera un rôle crucial dans la construction d'une ville intelligente. En fait, l'IoV a le potentiel de résoudre efficacement divers problèmes de trafic. Il est essentiel pour améliorer l'utilisation des routes, réduire la consommation d'énergie et la pollution et améliorer la sécurité routière. Néanmoins, le principal problème concernant l'IoV, et en particulier le Véhicule-à-Véhicule (V2V) et le Véhicule-à-infrastructure (V2I), est l'établissement de paiements et de communications sécurisés et instantanés. Pour répondre à ce défi, ce travail propose une solution basée sur la Blockchain pour mettre en place un paiement et une communication sécurisés afin d'étudier l'utilisation de la Blockchain comme middleware entre différents acteurs des systèmes de transport intelligents.Dans cette étude, nous avons évalué les propriétés les plus importantes de la solution développée, à savoir la consommation de la mémoire et de l’énergie, l’immutabilité, la confidentialité, la cohérence, l’intégrité, le temps d’exécution et le coût. L’objet de cette évaluation est de vérifier la capacité de la plateforme basée sur la Blockchain à assurer une communication efficace et un paiement sécurisé avec l’IoV. Selon les résultats, cette plateforme peut contribuer à résoudre les défis les plus critiques de la communication véhicule-à-tout (V2X) en améliorant la sécurité et l’évolutivité.
Liang Zhao, Muhammad Bin Saif, Ammar Hawbani, Geyong Min · 6 authors
Flying Ad hoc Network (FANET) has drawn significant consideration due to its rapid advancements and extensive use in civil applications. However, the characteristics of FANET including high mobility, limited resources, and distributed nature, have posed a new challenge to develop a secure and efficient routing scheme for FANET. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel cluster based secure routing scheme, which aims to solve the routing and data security problem of FANET. In this scheme, the optimal cluster head selection is based on residual energy, online time, reputation, blockchain transactions, mobility, and connectivity by using Improved Artificial Bee Colony Optimization (IABC). The proposed IABC utilizes two different search equations for employee bee and onlooker bee to enhance convergence rate and exploitation abilities. Further, a lightweight blockchain consensus algorithm, AI-Proof of Witness Consensus Algorithm (AI-PoWCA) is proposed, which utilizes the optimal cluster head for mining. In AI-PoWCA, the concept of the witness for block verification is also involved to make the proposed scheme resource efficient and highly resilient against 51% attack. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme outperforms its counterparts and achieves up to 90% packet delivery ratio, lowest end-to-end delay, highest throughput, resilience against security attacks, and superior in block processing time.
Amalia Damianou, Muhammad Amir Khan, Constantinos Marios Angelopoulos, Vasilios Katos
Internet of Things has emerged as a key techno-logical enabler for broader socio-technical and socio-economic paradigms, such as smart cities and Circular Economy. However, IoT systems are characterised by constraints and limitations which in order to be overcome they need to be deployed in conjunction and in synergy with other emerging ICT. Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) can help overcome challenges pertaining to data immutability, timeliness and security. However, the use of DLT does not satisfactorily mitigate security risks and vulnerabilities per se and currently cybersecurity aspects of IoT systems are addressed in a fragmented way. Furthermore, the conflict between the resource demanding Blockchains and the highly constrained nature of IoT devices hinders implementation efforts of corresponding systems. We consider networked systems that comprise both IoT and DLT technologies via the prism of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). We elicit a three-tier threat model identifying attack vectors at the Device, the Network and the DLT layers. The identified attacks are then ranked by using the DREAD ranking scheme. The use of the threat model is demonstrated on a novel proof-of-concept IoT networked system implemented using the IOTA Tangle distributed ledger, where it helps to critically appraise the design of the system against the most critical attacks. Furthermore, the developed system is among the first in the literature to demonstrate the synergy of IoT and DLT on actual constrained embedded devices. The performance evaluation provides insights showing that such systems can be efficient and suitable for real-life deployment.
Sonia Alice George, Steffie Maria Stephen, Arunita Jaekel
A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) consists of vehicles, roadside units, and other infrastructures that communicate with each other with the goal of improving road safety, reducing accidents, and alleviating traffic congestion. For safe and secure operation of critical applications in VANET, it is essential to ensure that only authenticated vehicles can participate in the network. Another important requirement for VANET communication is that the privacy of vehicles and their users must be protected. Privacy can be improved by using pseudonyms instead of actual vehicle identities during communication. However, it is also necessary to ensure that these pseudonyms can be linked to the real vehicle identities if needed, in order to maintain accountability. In this paper, we propose a new blockchain-based decentralized pseudonym management scheme for VANET. This allows the vehicles to maintain conditional anonymity in the network. The blockchain is used to maintain a record of each vehicle and all of its pseudo-IDs. The information in the blockchain can only be accessed by authorized entities and is not available to all vehicles. The proposed distributed framework maintains an immutable record of the vehicle data, which is not vulnerable to a single point of failure. We compared the performance of the proposed approach with a traditional PKI scheme and shown that it significantly reduces the authentication delay.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an emerging paradigm in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). It represents a promised solution to handle the massive amount of exchanged information and the continuous demand for services and applications. Nevertheless, the IoV systems showed several vulnerabilities to numerous attacks due to high mobility and fast network topology changing. Hence, the security of IoV systems remains an inevitable concern for researchers and automotive manufacturers. In this paper, we provide a Blockchain-based solution for reputation management in cloud-based IoV system. It ensures the monitoring of vehicles in the network through the computation of routing-based metrics by watchdog nodes, and the continuous update of their reputations, while calling for the use of blockchain technology. The computed reputation will be used to issue certificates and guarantee trust in the vehicular system. The whole computations are achieved in distributed and automated manner using smart contracts. Moreover, homomorphic encryption is used over the metrics to ensure data confidentiality.
To meet the execution requirements of delay-sensitive services in vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks, vehicular services need to be offloaded to edge computing nodes. For complex, large-scale services, the services need to be migrated if the services are not completed before the vehicles leave the coverage of edge computing nodes. Trust and resource matching between areas thus become major problems. This paper studies the decision model of vehicular service offloading and migration. First, software-defined network (SDN) technology is introduced into the traditional network architecture, and a two-layer distributed SDN-controlled VEC network architecture is designed, which is divided into a domain control layer and an area control layer. In this framework, we use the consortium blockchain as a carrier to share network topology information between SDN controllers to prevent information leakage. We then established a service offloading and migration optimization problem model to minimize service execution delay, reduce energy consumption and maximize the throughput of the blockchain system. We describe the problem model as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), introduce a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithm named asynchronous advantage actor-critic (A3C) and design a dynamic service offloading and migration algorithm (DSOMA) based on A3C to solve the problem. Simulation results show that DSOMA can increase the throughput of the blockchain system, and DSOMA is superior to the deep Q-learning (DQN) algorithm and greedy offloading algorithm in reducing service execution delay and system energy consumption.