Blockchain Papers

Sowmya Kudva, Shahriar Badsha, Shamik Sengupta, Hung Manh La · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Paulo Álvares, Lion Silva, Naércio Magaia

It had been predicted that by 2020, nearly 26 billion devices would be connected to the Internet, with a big percentage being vehicles. The Internet of Vehicles (IoVa) is a concept that refers to the connection and cooperation of smart vehicles and devices in a network through the generation, transmission, and processing of data that aims at improving traffic congestion, travel time, and comfort, all the while reducing pollution and accidents. However, this transmission of sensitive data (e.g., location) needs to occur with defined security properties to safeguard vehicles and their drivers since attackers could use this data. Blockchain is a fairly recent technology that guarantees trust between nodes through cryptography mechanisms and consensus protocols in distributed, untrustful environments, like IoV networks. Much research has been done in implementing the former in the latter to impressive results, as Blockchain can cover and offer solutions to many IoV problems. However, these implementations have to deal with the challenge of IoV node’s resource constraints since they do not suffice for the computational and energy requirements of traditional Blockchain systems, which is one of the biggest limitations of Blockchain implementations in IoV. Finally, these two technologies can be used to build the foundations for smart cities, enabling new application models and better results for end-users.

Markus Lücking, Felix Kretzer, Niclas Kannengießer, Michael Beigl · 6 authors

Communication between vehicles and their environment (i.e., vehicle-to-everything or V2X communication) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has become of particular importance for smart cities. However, economic challenges, such as the cost incurred by data sharing (e.g., due to power consumption), hinder the integration of data sharing in open systems into smart city applications, such as dynamic environmental zones. Moving from open data sharing to open data trading can address the economic challenges and incentivize vehicle drivers to share their data. In this context, integrating distributed ledger technology (DLT) into open systems for data trading is promising for reducing the transaction cost of payments in data trading, avoiding dependencies on third parties, and guaranteeing openness. However, because the integration of DLT conflicts with the short available communication time between fast moving objects in VANETs, it remains unclear how open data trading in VANETs using DLT should be designed to be viable. In this work, we present a system design for data trading in VANETs using DLT. We measure the required communication time for data trading between a vehicle and a roadside unit in a real scenario and estimate the associated cost. Our results show that the proposed system design is technically feasible and economically viable.

Conglin Ran, Shuailing Yan, Huang Liang, Lei Zhang

Abstract Ad hoc network is a special network with centerless and dynamic topology. Due to the free mobility of the nodes, routing security has been a bottleneck problem that plagues its development. Therefore, a multi-path QoS (quality of service) routing security algorithm based on blockchain by improving the traditional AODV (ad hoc on-demand distance vector) protocol (AODV-MQS) is proposed. Firstly, a chain of nodes is established in the network and the states of all nodes by making the intermediate nodes on the chain are saved. Secondly, the smart contract in the blockchain is set to filter out the nodes that meet the QoS constraints. Finally, two largest unrelated communication paths are found in the blockchain network through smart contract, one of which is the main path and the other is the standby path. Simulation experiments show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is better than other algorithms, especially in an unsafe environment.

Navid Khoshavi, Gabrielle Tristani, Arman Sargolzaei

Blockchain technology continues to grow and extend into more areas with great success, which highlights the importance of studying the fields that have been, and have yet to be, fundamentally changed by its entrance. In particular, blockchain technology has been shown to be increasingly relevant in the field of transportation systems. More studies continue to be conducted relating to both fields of study and their integration. It is anticipated that their existing relationships will be greatly improved in the near future, as more research is conducted and applications are better understood. Because blockchain technology is still relatively new as compared to older, more well-used methods, many of its future capabilities are still very much unknown. However, before they can be discovered, we need to fully understand past and current developments, as well as expert observations, in applying blockchain technology to the autonomous vehicle field. From an understanding and discussion of the current and potential future capabilities of blockchain technology, as provided through this survey, advancements can be made to create solutions to problems that are inherent in autonomous vehicle systems today. The focus of this paper is mainly on the potential applications of blockchain in the future of transportation systems to be integrated with connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to provide a broad overview on the current related literature and research studies in this field.

Qinglei Kong, Rongxing Lu, Feng Yin, Shuguang Cui

Driving behaviors are highly relevant to automotive statuses and on-board safety, which offer compelling shreds of evidence for mobility as a service (MaaS) providers to develop personalized rental prices and insurance products. However, the direct dissemination of driving behaviors may lead to violations of identity and location privacy. In this paper, our proposed mechanism first achieves the verifiable aggregation and immutable dissemination of performance records by exploiting a blockchain with the proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus. Moreover, to acquire a driver's aggregated performance record from the blockchain, the proposed scheme first realizes quick identification with a Bloom filter and further approaches the target performance record through an oblivious transfer (OT) protocol. A performance evaluation shows that during the acquisition of the records, the computational complexity of our scheme is only related to the scale of the records contained in one transaction. However, the computational complexity of one traditional scheme without a Bloom filter depends on the scale of the records generated during each time slot. Furthermore, the computational complexity of another traditional scheme without aggregation relies on the scale of the records contained in one transaction, as well as the length of a driver's performance history. We also investigate the trade-off between the privacy level and computational complexity, and we determine the optimal number of data records in each transaction.

Bohan Li, Ruochen Liang, Wei Zhou, Hailian Yin · 6 authors

In Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the vehiclead hocnetwork (VANET) provides the location-based service (LBS) when vehicles communicate with the dynamic environment. As an integration of satellite systems and terrestrial communications, the space–air–ground integrated network (SAGIN) provides a reliable and efficient way for LBS. But the privacy protection in SAGIN cannot meet LBS security requirements well, so we present a blockchain-based LBS security preserving trust model.$K$-anonymous location privacy protection algorithm is used to hide users’ real position so that users can avoid personal privacy disclosure when requesting LBSs. We propose a trust management algorithm which can detect the malicious behaviors when constructing anonymous regions and clear the malicious users out of the system. Besides, we use blockchain to implement the transparency and conditional anonymity of the system. Missive experiments indicate that our scheme is feasible and outperforms part of state-of-the-art privacy protection approaches.

Peter Pommer

Autonomous vehicle systems, including multi-vehicle systems, are becoming increasingly relevant in military operations. A problem emerges, however, when logging data within these systems. In particular, loss of individual vehicles and inherently lossy and noisy communications environments can result in the loss of important mission data. This thesis presents a novel distributed ledger protocol that can be used to ensure that the data in such a system survives. To test the efficacy of the protocol, we implemented it as a Robot Operating System (ROS) node on the Advanced Robotic Systems Engineering Laboratory (ARSENL) aerial swarm system. Results are presented for implementation tests in the ARSENL software-in-the-loop simulation environment and during live-flight field experiments conducted at Camp Roberts, CA.

Nitish Andola, Raghav, Vijay Kumar Yadav, S. Venkatesan · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Sandeep Kumar Arora, Gulshan Kumar, Tai-hoon Kim

Blockchain is the consensus-based technology used to resolve conflicts in Byzantine environments. Vehicles validate the messages received from neighboring vehicles using the gradient boosting technique (GBT). Based on the validation results, the message source vehicle generates the ratings that are to be uploaded to roadside units (RSUs), and through that, the trust offset value can be calculated. All RSUs maintain the trust blockchain, and each RSU tries to add their blocks to the trust blockchain. We proposed a blockchain-based trust management model for the vehicular adhoc network (VANET) based on Tendermint. It eliminates the problem of malicious nodes entering the network, and will also overcome the problem of power consumption. Simulation results also show that the proposed system is 7.8% and 15.6% effective and efficient in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and end-to-end delay (EED), respectively, to collect the trusted data between the vehicles.

Dakshita Reebadiya, Tejal Rathod, Rajesh Gupta, Sudeep Tanwar · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Rateb Jabbar, Noora Fetais, Mohamed Kharbeche, Moez Krichen · 6 authors

As the Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving, one of its rapidly developing components is the transformation of standard Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Due to the exceptional progress in computation and communication technologies, the IoV has attracted the attention of researchers and commercial companies. Nevertheless, the primary issue regarding the IoV, and in particular to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), is establishing secure and instant payments and communications. To respond to this challenge, this work proposes a Blockchain-based solution for establishing secure payment and communication (PSEV) in order to study the use of Blockchain as middle-ware between different participants of intelligent transportation systems. The proposed framework employs Ethereum to develop a solution aimed at facilitating Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications and parking payments. Moreover, the solution includes Android auto and application modules for automating the communication process. It was experimentally tested to assess its computational costs, communication expenses and the real-time aspect (RTA). The results of computational tests revealed that the developed solution is faster and more scalable than the existing solutions.

Uzair Javaid, Biplab Sikdar

The integration of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with social networks has introduced Social IoV (SIoV) that will offer new applications in vehicular networks, e.g., personalized recommendations and route planning. This will be facilitated by heterogeneous access technologies and edge computing to offload tasks from vehicles via secure resource assignment. Thus, each vehicle in SIoV acts as a social subject that manages its own network. SIoV will lead to an explosive growth in network size, and induce issues like scalability and resource discovery. Blockchain is a potential candidate to address these, however, it is not suitable for SIoV with traditional proof-of-work (PoW) consensus. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses a dynamic PoW (dPoW) consensus with a checkpoint mechanism and a resource assignment policy. The dPoW consensus has different mining difficulty levels that change according to the communication traffic, whereas the checkpoint defines an alternative mechanism to generate the next block hash. The assignment policy manages an access control list to mandate the edge modules to securely distribute resources among vehicles. To study the feasibility of our framework, we present a formal security analysis using the Access Control Logic model. For the performance analysis, we use three metrics, i.e., scalability, latency, and security. With these analyses, we demonstrate that our framework offers enhanced security and can scale with a minimal increase in computation overhead. A case study with a comparative analysis is also discussed that evaluates the network dynamics and attests the superior performance of the framework under a real-life vehicular network scenario.

Azees Maria, Pandi Vijayakumar, L. Jegatha Deborah, Marimuthu Karuppiah · 5 authors

Smart driving has become conceivable due to the rapid growth of vehicular ad hoc networks. VANETs are considered as the main platform for providing safety road information and instant vehicle communication. Nevertheless, due to the open wireless nature of communication channels, VANET is susceptible to security attacks by malicious users. For this reason, secure anonymous authentication schemes are essential in VANETs. However, when vehicles reach a new roadside unit (RSU) coverage area, the vehicles need to perform reauthentication with the current RSU, which significantly diminishes the efficiency of the entire VANET. Therefore, the introduction of blockchain technology has created opportunities for VANETs to resolve the aforementioned challenges. Due to the decentralized nature of blockchain technology, rapid reauthentication of vehicles is achieved in this paper through secure authentication code transfer between the consecutive RSUs. The security strength of the proposed blockchain-based anonymous authentication scheme against various harmful security attacks is proven in the security analysis section to ensure that it provides better security. In addition, blockchain, as presented in the performance analysis section, is used to substantially diminish the computational cost compared to conventional authentication schemes.

Varun Kurri, Vishweshvaran Raja, P. Prakasam

No abstract is available for this record.

Leila Benarous, Benamar Kadri, Ahmed Bouridane, Elhadj Benkhelifa

Abstract Vehicle registration system is an essential process for recording the transfer of vehicles' ownership. Most of existing systems are administratively centralized, semi‐automated, and rely on a formal proof provision. While these systems were initially proposed to preserve the owner's rights, prove their ownerships and legally record used motor‐land transportation means. Unfortunately, these systems also allow the registration of illegally smuggled and stolen vehicles. This is mainly due to inefficient verification methods, long heterogeneous administrative procedures or to corrupt individuals at the motor registration departments. Regardless of the reasons, the fact that the system allows such cases hints on a faulty design. Current systems are centralized and do not perform a double checking until a report is made, which means that this occurs after the fact of registering the forged vehicle. Noting that these reports are not always fruitful, if the vehicle's proofs were properly injected in the system. This paper proposes a system that is transparent where every vehicle registration is done under everyone's watchful eyes. No denying, no alteration, and no unauthorized injection may occur. The proposed system saves the owner's information and the vehicle's descriptions in transactions saved in a public blockchain where all the history of purchases regarding the subject vehicle may be tracked. The use of blockchain technology is motivated by its security, transparency, and traceability as well as its immutability and scalability in terms of users. We have evaluated our proposed solution in terms of its security and resiliency to the injection of forged transactions by the elaboration of the attack tree. The results show our solution's superiority when compared against current registration system.

Han Liu, Dezhi Han, Dun Li

No abstract is available for this record.

Zhiguo Wan, Tong Zhang, Weizhuang Liu, Mingqiang Wang · 5 authors

With the fast development of the electric vehicle (EV) technology, EVs are expected to be the mainstream in future. The large number of EVs facilitate development of the emerging vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, which realizes two-way electricity flows between EVs and the power grid. How to achieve fairness and privacy for EVs during electricity/service exchanges remains a challenging problem for V2G. In this article, we propose a privacy-preserving fair exchange schemeV2GExfor V2G based on the blockchain. V2GEx is composed of an extended blockchain that supports zero-knowledge funds, a fair exchange smart contract based on the hashchain micropayment mechanism, and a privacy-preserving protocol for V2G. We further propose a simpler and more efficient scheme called Uni-V2GEx, which preserves privacy for only one party. We also provide a rigorous security proof under the universal composability (UC) model to prove V2GEx's security. To evaluate its efficiency, we implement V2GEx and conduct comprehensive experiments to test its performance in terms of computation cost and processing delay. The experiment results show that V2GEx is highly efficient in that verification of V2GEx transactions costs only 20 ms and the average transaction processing latency is around 6 seconds in a 200-node blockchain network.

Chencheng Zhou, Liudong Xing, Qisi Liu, Honggang Wang

The block chain technology has immense potential in many different applications, including but not limited to cryptocurrencies, financial services, smart contracts, supply chains, healthcare services, and energy trading. Due to the critical nature of these applications, it is pivotal to model and evaluate dependability of the block chain-based systems, contributing to their reliable and robust operation. This paper models and analyzes the dependability of Bitcoin nodes subject to Eclipse attacks and state-dependent mitigation activities. Built upon the block chain technology, the Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency system enabling an individual user to trade freely without the involvement of banks or any other types of intermediate agents. However, a node in the Bitcoin is vulnerable to the Eclipse attack, which aims to monopolize the information flow of the victim node. A semi-Markov process (SMP) based approach is proposed to model the Eclipse attack behavior and possible mitigation activities that may prevent the attack from being successful during the attack process. The SMP model is then evaluated to determine the steady-state dependability of the Bitcoin node. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the influence of the time to restart the Bitcoin software and time to detect and delete the malicious message on the Bitcoin node dependability.

Chencheng Zhou, Liudong Xing, Qisi Liu

The immense potential of the blockchain technology in diverse and critical applications (e.g., financial services, cryptocurrencies, supply chains, smart contracts, and automotive industry) has led to a new challenge: the dependability modeling and analysis of the blockchain-based systems. In this paper, we model the Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency system built on the blockchain technology that allows individuals to trade freely without involving banks or other intermediate agents. We analyze the dependability of the Bitcoin system subject to the Eclipse attack. A continuous-time Markov chain-based method is suggested to model the system behavior under the Eclipse attack and further quantify the dependability of the Bitcoin system. The effects of several model parameters (related to the miner’s habits in system protection, restart, and mining frequency) on the system dependability are demonstrated through numerical examples. Findings from this work may provide effective guidelines in designing a resilient and robust Bitcoin system.

A. F. M. Suaib Akhter, Mohiuddin Ahmed, A. F. M. Shahen Shah, Adnan Anwar · 6 authors

The efficiency of cooperative communication protocols to increase the reliability and range of transmission for Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is proven, but identity verification and communication security are required to be ensured. Though it is difficult to maintain strong network connections between vehicles because of there high mobility, with the help of cooperative communication, it is possible to increase the communication efficiency, minimise delay, packet loss, and Packet Dropping Rate (PDR). However, cooperating with unknown or unauthorized vehicles could result in information theft, privacy leakage, vulnerable to different security attacks, etc. In this paper, a blockchain based secure and privacy preserving authentication protocol is proposed for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). Blockchain is utilized to store and manage the authentication information in a distributed and decentralized environment and developed on the Ethereum platform that uses a digital signature algorithm to ensure confidentiality, non-repudiation, integrity, and preserving the privacy of the IoVs. For optimized communication, transmitted services are categorized into emergency and optional services. Similarly, to optimize the performance of the authentication process, IoVs are categorized as emergency and general IoVs. The proposed cooperative protocol is validated by numerical analyses which show that the protocol successfully increases the system throughput and decreases PDR and delay. On the other hand, the authentication protocol requires minimum storage as well as generates low computational overhead that is suitable for the IoVs with limited computer resources.

Ahmed Elkhalil, Jiashu Zhang, Rashad Elhabob

No abstract is available for this record.

Branka Mikavica, Aleksandra Kostić-Ljubisavljević

No abstract is available for this record.

Salvatore Distefano, Andrea Di Giacomo, Manuel Mazzara

Modern transportation systems, such as computer networks, have become increasingly faster, aiming to “shorten” distances and travel time. This trend allows thinking about new services and induces to reconsider existing ones starting from new technologies, as for Intelligent Transportation Systems. Thereby, an all-encompassing scenario laying at the intersection of several domains, including manufacturing, logistics, traveling, insurance, maintenance, and trading, with the transportation one, can be envisioned. The building block for the resulting transportation ecosystem is an information system that is able to gather and connect all involved stakeholders and domains around the concept of mobility and vehicle to address complex multifaceted problems in an efficient and trustworthy way. This paper proposes the adoption of distributed ledgers to implement such a vehicle-centric information system, distributing data across the network while ensuring trustworthiness. Starting from the vehicle lifecycle immutable and certified information, new services for cross-cuttingly addressing diversity and complexity in the transportation ecosystem can be implemented. The proposed solution merges Multichain and MongoDB technologies to achieve a trade-off between trustworthiness and performance, storing only the metadata in the Multichain network. Its effectiveness is demonstrated by an example on a vehicle trading service showing an overhead for the proposed solution below 18% against a pure MongoDB one on I/O operations.