Amira Kchaou, Ryma Abassi, Samiha Ayed, Sihem Guemara El Fatmi
Recently, the Vehicular Ad-hoc network (VANET) has progressively gained attention from both industry and research with the rapid development of wireless communication technology and intelligent vehicles. The vehicles exchange messages with other entities but cannot share the resources between them. Therefore, security is required in some scenarios including integrity, traceability, confidentiality, notarization of exchanged information as well as access control. In order to provide a secure vehicle communication and access control, we propose an ABAC access control model using smart contract on the blockchain. The use of the blockchain facilitates the sharing of secure messages among vehicles. Moreover, vehicles are able to share the resources with each other exploiting the access control policy on the XACML standard. Then, we evaluate the access response time and the storage overhead of the proposal.
Internet of Vehicles (IoV), whose basic concepts are like those of the Internet of Things (IoT), refers to the ability of vehicles to communicate intelligently with each other through the exchange of information. To guarantee the services offered by IoV, it is necessary to consider the exchange of a large amount of information without human intervention and in a decentralized manner. To overcome these challenges, the use of blockchain technology is required. This technology is supported by the concept of smart contracts and implements the notion of decentralized applications (DApp). Our objective is, then, to design a decentralized application that brings together all the services accessible by vehicles. The user, depending on the type of service, can filter the search result and benefit from the appropriate service. Via this paper, we present the basic concepts to be used in the development of our platform such as blockchain, smart contracts, DApp and their relationship with IoV. We model the communication between the different actors of the system as well as the design of the proposed framework.
Sushil Kumar Singh, Jong Hyuk Park, Pradip Kumar Sharma, Yi Pan
Today, the rapid growth of vehicles connected to the Internet enables provides various services to consumers, including traffic management, traffic safety, and entertainment. Vehicular ad-hoc network is one of the most prominent and emerging technologies on the Internet of Vehicular Things (IoVT). This technology offers to fulfill requirements such as robust information exchange, and infotainment among vehicles for the smart city environment. Still, it has some challenges such as centralization, storage, security, and privacy because all city vehicular networks send vehicles and road-related information data directly to the cloud. This article proposes BIIoVT: Blockchain-based secure storage architecture for Intelligent Internet of Vehicular Things to mitigate the above-mention issues. Blockchain provides security and privacy at each city's vehicular networks and decentralized storage at the cloud layer with a distributed hash table. It also examines how the vehicular network offers a secure platform. The validation results of the proposed architecture show an outstanding balance of secure storage and efficiency for the IoVT compared to existing methods.
The concept of interconnecting smart vehicles and advancements in automotive automation leads to beneficial outcomes, such as a reduction in road fatalities and congestion. However, including a chain of automation in the attack surface will expand the attack surface and expose the security of automobiles to malicious infiltration. The proposed methodology provides access to specific users while restricting the third party requests. Moreover, it also makes use of data exchange that takes place between the roadside units and vehicle to track the vehicle status without compromising the in-vehicle network. To ensure a valid and authentic communication, vehicles with a proper and verifiable record will only be allowed to exchange messages in the blockchain network. Using qualitative arguments, we have identified that the proposed work is resilient to identified attacks. Similarly, quantitative experimentation indicates that this methodology shows a storage size compatibility and suitable response time in realistic scenarios. Simulation results indicate that, the proposed work shows positive results to secure vehicular networks, vehicular forensics and trust management.
Sathish Kumar, S. Velliangiri, P. Karthikeyan, Saru Kumari · 6 authors
Abstract Recently, The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) concept is becoming very popular due to sharing of the data between vehicles and the infrastructure. The sharing of data is very important for enhancing vehicular services, but at the same time makes IoV vulnerable for security and privacy issues. The smart and interconnected vehicles produce sophisticated services for transport authorities, car manufacturers, vehicle owners, and other service providers. IoV are very vulnerable to malicious attacks due to its self‐organizing nature and the open source nature of its implementations. This exposes the smart and interconnected vehicles to a variety of privacy and security threats, such as a remote hijacking or location tracking of vehicles. Thus, the security for IoV environment is critical. Blockchain technology has been recently used for cybersecurity due to the robustness and integrity preserving nature of its design. This review article provides a detailed survey of existing work in the literature to secure IoV through blockchain techniques such as security, privacy, reputation, distributed, decentralized, data sharing, authentication, and trust‐based approaches. The paper presents the detailed discussion and analysis of these blockchain techniques to secure IoV. In addition, we present the gaps and research challenges identified from the existing research works. This provides work directions for future research in blockchain techniques to secure IoV.
In recent years, the privacy issue in Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC) has gained a lot of concern. The privacy problem is even more severe in autonomous driving business than the other businesses in VEC such as ordinary navigation. Federated learning (FL), which is a privacy-preserved strategy proposed by Google, has become a hot trend to solve the privacy problem in many fields including VEC. Therefore, we introduce FL into autonomous driving to preserve vehicular privacy by keeping original data in a local vehicle and sharing the training model parameter only with the help of MEC server. Moreover, different from the common assumption of honest MEC server and honest vehicle in former studies, we take the malicious MEC servers and malicious vehicles into account. First, we consider honest-but-curious MEC server and malicious vehicles and propose a traceable identity-based privacy preserving scheme to protect the vehicular message privacy where improved Dijk-Gentry-Halevi-Vaikutanathan (DGHV) algorithm is proposed and a blockchain-based Reputation-based Incentive Autonomous Driving Mechanism (RIADM) is adopted. Further, when the case comes to the non-credibility of both parties where semi-honest MEC server and malicious vehicles are considered, we propose an anonymous identity-based privacy preserving scheme to protect the identity privacy of vehicles with Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP). Based on the simulation of virtual autonomous driving based on real-world road images, it is verified that our proposes scheme can reduce 73.7 % training loss of autonomous driving, increase the accuracy to around 5.55 % while keeps effective privacy of message and identity under the threat of dishonest MEC server and vehicles.
Muhammad Awais Khan, Saptarshi Ghosh, Sherif Adeshina Busari, Kazi Mohammed Saidul Huq · 8 authors
The new developments in mobile edge computing (MEC) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications has positioned 5G and beyond in a strong position to answer the market need towards future emerging intelligent transportation systems and smart city applications. The major attractive features of V2X communication is the inherent ability to adapt to any type of network, device, or data, and to ensure robustness, resilience and reliability of the network, which is challenging to realize. In this work, we propose to drive further these features by proposing a novel robust, resilient and reliable architecture for V2X communication based on harnessing MEC and blockchain technology. A three stage computing service is proposed. Firstly, a hierarchcial computing architecture is deployed spanning over the vehicular network that constitutes cloud computing (CC), edge computing (EC), fog computing (FC) nodes. The resources and data bases can migrate from the high capacity cloud services (furthest away from the individual node of the network) to the edge (medium) and low level fog node, according to computing service requirements. Secondly, the resource allocation filters the data according to its significance, and rank the nodes according to their usability, and selects the network technology according to their physical channel characteristics. Thirdly, we propose a blockchain-based transaction service that ensures reliability. We discussed two use cases for experimental analysis, plug-in electric vehicles in smart grid scenarios, and massive IoT data services for autonomous cars. The results show that car connectivity prediction is accurate 98% of the times, where 92% more data blocks are added using micro-blockchain solution compared to the public blockchain, where it is able to reduce the time to sign and compute the proof-of-work (PoW), and deliver a low-overhead Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism. This approach can be considered a strong candidate architecture for future V2X, and with more general application for everything-to-everything (X2X) communications.
Jie Cui, Fenqiang Ouyang, Zuobin Ying, Lu Wei · 5 authors
The large amount of driving data can help intelligent vehicles make decisions to drive safely, improve vehicular services and enhance driving experience. In traditional vehicular networks, data sharing needs to be done with roadside units (RSUs). However, RSUs cannot be entirely trusted and the data stored in the RSUs may be tampered with. In addition, the deployment of RSUs along roads consumes a large amount of social resources. Further, data sharing between vehicles lacks a trusted environment, and vehicles may be unwilling to share data with others because of data security and privacy concerns. Moreover, in the event of unauthorized data sharing, the source of the leaked data is difficult to trace. In this study, we exploit consortium blockchain technology to achieve traceable and anonymous vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) data sharing, effectively preventing second-hand sharing of data. The combination of 5G and blockchain makes it possible to share data without using RSUs. We design an enhanced delegated proof-of-stake consensus algorithm to make it more suitable for applications in the distributed Internet of Vehicles (IoV). A comprehensive analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient.
The increasing prevalence and sophistication of autonomous vehicles are intricately tied with the advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly in refining their network architectures. This technical exposition unfolds the paramount role of AI in autonomous vehicles, spotlighting its capabilities in sensor data processing, decision - making, and fostering Vehicle - to - Everything (V2X) communications. Moreover, the article elucidates the evolution and enhancement of network architectures through AI - driven technologies such as edge computing, centralized data centers, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT), and 5G communications. An additional layer of exploration is provided in network security, with AI safeguarding vehicular networks through anomaly detection and ensuring secure data transmission. This interplay between AI and network architecture elevates autonomous vehicles' operational efficiency and safety and acts as a linchpin in realizing a coherent and intelligent transportation ecosystem. The comprehensive integration of AI within the network forms the foundation for autonomous vehicles to navigate within an interconnected mobility infrastructure harmoniously and securely.
Traditional identity authentication solutions mostly rely on a trusted central entity, so they cannot handle single points of failure well. In addition, most of these traditional schemes need to store a large amount of identity authentication or public key information, which makes the schemes difficult to expand and use in distributed situations. In addition, the user prefers to protect the privacy of their information during the identity verification process. Due to the open and decentralized nature of the blockchain, the existing identity verification schemes are difficult to apply well in the blockchain. To solve this problem, in this article, we propose a privacy protection identity authentication scheme based on the blockchain. The user independently generates multiple-identity information, and these identities can be used to apply for an identity certificate. Authorities use the ECDSA signature algorithm and the RSA encryption algorithm to complete the distribution of the identity certificate based on the identity information and complete the registration of identity authentication through the smart contract on the blockchain. On the one hand, it can realize the protection of real identity information; on the other hand, it can avoid the storage overhead caused by the need to store a large number of certificates or key pairs. Due to the use of the blockchain, there is no single point of failure in the authentication process, and it can be applied to distributed scenarios. The security and performance analysis show that the proposed scheme can meet security requirements and is feasible.
The vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are considered a key mechanism for the collection and dissemination of basic safety messages (BSM) in the modern transportation system. However, the presence of compromised or malicious vehicles within the network can disrupt the security of the information and the safety of the passengers. The emergence of a blockchain-based distributed framework in VANETs ensures transparency and security within the network without the assist of a trusted centralized entity. Nonetheless, the presence of the majority of malicious vehicles within the region of interest (ROI) can still bypass the security provided by the state-of-the-art blockchain-based frameworks. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain-assisted Misbehavior Detection and Event Validation (BLAME) framework that can effectively detect the valid traffic events and the malicious vehicles from the ROI by leveraging the neighbor information and the event recorded by the individual vehicles even if they are in majority. The efficacy of BLAME has been validated through simulations in VENTOS simulators and a simulated blockchain environment by extensively addressing different use case scenarios.
With the development of wireless communication technology and the automobile industry, the Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks bring many conveniences to humans in terms of safety and entertainment. In the process of communication between the nodes, security problems are the main concerns. Blockchain is a decentralized distributed technology used in nonsecure environments. Using blockchain technology in the VANETs can solve the security problems. However, the characteristics of highly dynamic and resource-constrained VANETs make the traditional chain blockchain system not suitable for actual VANETs scenarios. Therefore, this paper proposes a lightweight blockchain architecture using DAG-lattice structure for VANETs, called V-Lattice. In V-Lattice, each node (vehicle or roadside unit) has its own account chain. The transactions they generated can be added to the blockchain asynchronously and parallelly, and resource-constrained vehicles can store the pruned blockchain and execute blockchain related operations normally. At the same time, in order to encourage more nodes to participate in the blockchain, a reputation-based incentive mechanism is introduced in V-Lattice. This paper uses Colored Petri Nets to verify the security of the architecture and verifies the feasibility of PoW anti-spam through experiment. The validation results show that the architecture proposed in this paper is security, and it is feasible to prevent nodes from generating malicious behaviors by using PoW anti-spam.
As a promising technology, the Internet of Vehicle (IoV) enables vehicles to be connected to the network and sends announcements to roadside units (RSUs) or other vehicles. Nevertheless, because of the open nature of IoV, trust and privacy are confronted with challenges from cyber attacks. Motivated by addressing the above-mentioned problems, a privacy-preserving announcement protocol is constructed in this article, in which an identity-based group signature is used to achieve anonymity of vehicles. In addition, a novel blockchain-based trust management system is designed to guarantee the authenticity of the transmitted messages while realizing the message synchronization. In the meanwhile, a joint proof of work and improved practical Byzantine fault tolerance consensus mechanism is adopted in our scheme to enhance the efficiency of verification. Security analysis as well as simulation results indicate that our proposal is suitable and effective for the IoV environment.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) aims to connect vehicles with their surroundings and share data. In IoV, various wireless technologies like 5G, WIFI, DSRC, WiMAX, and ZigBee are used. To share data within wireless surroundings in a secure way, some security aspects need to be fulfilled. Blockchain technology is a good fit to cover these countermeasures. IoV uses a lot of technologies and interacts with different types of wireless nodes, and this increases the vulnerability to some attacks that could endanger lives. Using blockchain technology within the IoV architecture could provide efficient solutions to overcome these attacks. In this paper, we present the IoV security requirements and their countermeasures using blockchain technology. We also introduce some serious attacks over the IoV architecture and the different countermeasures to overcome these attacks.
Abdelwahab Boualouache, Hichem Sedjelmaci, Thomas Engel
Privacy is a key requirement for connected vehicles. Cooperation between vehicles is mandatory for achieving location privacy preservation. However, non-cooperative vehicles can be a big issue to achieve this objective. To this end, we propose a novel monetary incentive scheme for cooperative location privacy preservation in 5G-enabled Vehicular Fog Computing. This scheme leverages a consortium blockchain-enabled fog layer and smart contracts to ensure a trusted and secure cooperative Pseudonym Changing Processes (PCPs). We also propose optimized smart contracts to reduce the monetary costs of vehicles while providing more location privacy preservation. Moreover, a resilient and lightweight Utility-based Delegated Byzantine Fault Tolerance (U-DBFT) consensus protocol is proposed to ensure fast and reliable block mining and validation. The performance analysis shows that our scheme has effective incentive techniques to stimulate non-cooperative vehicles and provides optimal monetary cost management and secure, private, fast validation of blocks.
El-hacen Diallo, Omar Dib, Nicola Roberto Zema, Khaldoun Al Agha
Smart vehicles, through dedicated sensors, can gather and announce information about road traffic events. This information can be exploited to improve the transportation system. However, with the ubiquity of cyber-attacks, it is challenging to safely store and share event messages collected through Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs). Therefore, in this work, we leverage blockchain technology capability to establish a decentralized, transparent and robust database to build, in turn, a robust and secure traffic event management protocol. We adapt the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism to this context while testing network configurations via NS-3. The performance of the blockchain is evaluated and its reliability in the presence of attackers (malicious vehicles) is examined and discussed. The results highlight a trade-off between the events' trustworthiness and the blockchain's reliability and security.
Muhammad Usman Aftab, Mehdi Hussain, Anders Lindgren, Abdul Ghafoor
To ensure traffic safety and proper operation of vehicular networks, safety messages or beacons are periodically broadcasted in Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) to neighboring nodes and road side units (RSU). Thus, authenticity and integrity of received messages along with the trust in source nodes is crucial and highly required in applications where a failure can result in life-threatening situations. Several digital signature based approaches have been described in literature to achieve the authenticity of these messages. In these schemes, scenarios having high level of vehicle density are handled by RSU where aggregated signature verification is done. However, most of these schemes are centralized and PKI based where our goal is to develop a decentralized dynamic system. Along with authenticity and integrity, trust management plays an important role in VANETs which enables ways for secure and verified communication. A number of trust management models have been proposed but it is still an ongoing matter of interest, similarly authentication which is a vital security service to have during communication is not mostly present in the literature work related to trust management systems. This paper proposes a secure and publicly verifiable communication scheme for VANET which achieves source authentication, message authentication, non repudiation, integrity and public verifiability. All of these are achieved through digital signatures, Hash Message Authentication Code (HMAC) technique and logging mechanism which is aided by blockchain technology.
Platooning technologies enable trucks to drive cooperatively and automatically, which bring benefits including less fuel consumption, more road capacity and safety. In order to establish trust during dynamic platoon formation, ensure vehicular data integrity, and guard platoons against potential attackers, it is pivotal to verify any given vehicle's identity information before granting it access to join a platoon. To address this concern in dynamic truck platooning, we present a novel location-aware and privacy-preserving verification protocol based on zero-knowledge proof and permissioned blockchain. By performing the verification process within the spatially-local area defined by a given platoon, our system can provide lower latency and communication overhead compared to a location-agnostic blockchain system. We prototype the proposed system and perform benchmark tests on the Hyperledger platform. The experimental results show that our system is suitable for real-world truck platooning.
Smart vehicles are expected to be equipped with high-dimensional, resource-intensive applications, including platoon control, augmented reality supported gaming, AI-based pedestrian detection, fuel scheduling, and so on, catering to diverse user preferences and enhancing safety and efficiency. These applications pose unique challenges for resource-constrained vehicles due to their intense computation requirements, whereas vehicular edge computing (VEC) networks, consisting of roadside units (RSUs) and MEC servers, contain the capability of providing cloud-like computing experience at vehicular edges while meeting performance requirements in terms of latency and throughput. Moreover, the development of intelligent VEC (IVEC) infrastructure is accelerated due to rapid advancement of AI algorithms in recent years. However, IVEC is prone to attacks, including fake computation feedback, unfair or biased resource allocation in a VEC server, and so on, due to its centralized governance and black box computation (edge computation works like a black box for end users). To combat such security vulnerabilities, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized architecture to enhance transparency in IVEC resource management and leverage edge consumers (e.g., vehicles) with a computation verification option. Additionally, we address the unbalanced load distribution issue and propose a secure IVEC federation model for balancing loads. We also outline the main challenges and provide a brief description of promising research directions to draw the attention of concerned stakeholders and parties in both the blockchain and edge computing domains.
The vehicular networks constructed by interconnected vehicles and transportation infrastructure are vulnerable to cyber-intrusions due to the expanded use of software and the introduction of wireless interfaces. Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) can be customized efficiently in response to this increased attack surface. There has been significant progress in detecting malicious attack traffic using machine learning approaches. However, existing IDSs require network devices with powerful computing capabilities to continuously train and update complex network models, which reduces the efficiency and defense capability of intrusion detection systems due to limited resources and untimely model updates. This work proposes a cooperative intrusion detection mechanism that offloads the training model to distributed edge devices (e.g., connected vehicles and roadside units (RSUs). Distributed federated-based approach reduces resource utilization of the central server while assuring security and privacy. To ensure the security of the aggregation model, blockchain is used for the storage and sharing of the training models. This work analyzes common attacks and shows that the proposed scheme achieves cooperative privacy-preservation for vehicles while reducing communication overhead and computation cost.