Blockchain Papers

Abid Jamal, Muhammad Usman Gurmani, Saba Awan, Maimoona Bint E. Sajid · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Donpiti Chulerttiyawong, Abbas Jamalipour

A feasible approach commonly discussed in the literature for mitigating location privacy threats in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is the use of pseudonyms instead of real vehicle identifications. However, for relevant authorities to be able to identify misbehaving vehicles through their pseudonyms, it is essential that the privacy protection mechanisms only allow for conditional anonymity and not complete anonymity. In this paper, we propose the use of a permissioned consortium blockchain system with smart contract feature to facilitate secure and conditional privacy-preserving vehicular pseudonym issuance and management in a multi-jurisdictional road network. The use of a permissioned consortium blockchain helps mitigate security risks associated with the complexities in interorganizational data handling, such as in the areas of access control, data integrity, confidentiality, and availability. The proposed system architecture takes advantage of the predicted wide availability of Roadside Units (RSUs), and the highly viable, flexible and mature Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) technology for usage in vehicular pseudonymous communications. We successfully carried out a small-scale simulation of the proposed architecture using the Vehicles in Network Simulation (Veins) platform for integrated traffic and network simulation services (SUMO as the traffic simulator and OMNeT++ as the network simulator), and the Hyperledger Fabric platform as the permissioned consortium blockchain system. Simulation and performance analysis results reveal the feasibility of practical deployment of the scheme, and show that the scheme addresses the identified shortfalls of existing works, including the ability to achieve a better balance between connectivity and storage requirements.

C. Muralidharan, Y. Mohamed Sirajudeen, R. Anitha

No abstract is available for this record.

M. Karthiga, S Nandhini, R. M. Tharsanee, M. Nivaashini · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Mena Safwat, Ali Elgammal, Wael Badawy, Marianne A. Azer

No abstract is available for this record.

El-hacen Diallo, Omar Dib, Khaldoun Al Agha

No abstract is available for this record.

Alkhansaa A. Abuhashim, Chiu C. Tan

No abstract is available for this record.

Soumyashree S. Panda, Debasish Jena, Bhabendu Kumar Mohanta, Srikanta Patnaik

With the omnipresence of technology, intelligent transportation system (ITS) is no more a distant dream but has become an achievable reality. One of the fundamental challenges in the implementation of an ITS is the proper management of security and privacy issues, especially how the system confirms the validity of its users. Most of the existing security mechanisms are based on a centralized framework and assume the registration authority and roadside units to be trustful. Therefore, a distributed framework using Blockchain and, a very lightweight and privacy-preserving authentication protocol employing an interactive zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) based on elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is proposed. An in-depth analysis of the protocol demonstrates that it meets all the security and privacy requisites of an ITS. In addition, the suggested protocol is also validated using the widely used AVISPA tool. The reliability and effectiveness of the protocol are analyzed through simulation using NS2 which proves the practicality of the protocol.

Nidhee Kamble, Ritu Gala, Revathi Vijayaraghavan, Eshita Shukla · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Abdullah Alharthi, Qiang Ni, Richard Jiang

In the near future, intelligent vehicles will be part of the Internet of Things (IoT) and will offer valuable services and opportunities that could revolutionise human life in smart cities. The Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is the core structure of intelligent vehicles. It ensures the accuracy and security of communication in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) modes to enhance road safety and decrease traffic congestion. However, VANET is subject to security vulnerabilities such as denial-of-service (DoS), replay attacks and Sybil attacks that may undermine the security and privacy of the network. Such issues may lead to the transmission of incorrect information from a malicious node to other nodes in the network. In this paper, we present a biometrics blockchain (BBC) framework to secure data sharing among vehicles in VANET and to retain statuary data in a conventional and trusted system. In the proposed framework, we take advantage of biometric information to keep a record of the genuine identity of the message sender, thus preserving privacy. Therefore, the proposed BBC scheme establishes security and trust between vehicles in VANET alongside the capacity to trace identities whenever required. Simulations in OMNeT++, veins and SUMO were carried out to demonstrate the viability of the proposed framework using the urban mobility model. The performance of the framework is evaluated in terms of packet delivery rate, packet loss rate and computational cost. The results show that our novel model is superior to existing approaches.

Liming Gao, Celimuge Wu, Tsutomu Yoshinaga, Xianfu Chen · 5 authors

With the development of advanced information and communication technology, the traditional centralized service model alone no longer meets the increasing demand of data exchange in intelligent transportation systems (ITS). While Internet of Vehicles (IoV) technology has been introduced to achieve more advanced ITS, there are still some unsettled issues such as flexibility and fault tolerance. The conventional centralized approach for ITS is vulnerable to the single point of failure, and lack of flexibility due to its dependence on a trusted third party (TTP). The emergence of blockchain technology provides a potential direction to address these problems. However, due to varying vehicle densities, it is challenging to select the best blockchain parameters to satisfy the application requirements. In this paper, we propose a multi-channel blockchain scheme that can use the best parameters in accordance with the vehicle density. The proposed scheme first defines multiple blockchain channels where each channel is optimized for a certain vehicle density level. Then, the system selects the best channel according to the vehicle density, and the application requirements on the transaction throughput and latency. We use extensive simulations to show that the proposed blockchain scheme achieves a significantly better performance as compared with existing baselines.

Ibrahim Aliyu, Marco Carlo Feliciano, Sélinde van Engelenburg, Dong Ok Kim · 5 authors

In-vehicle communication systems are usually managed by controller area networks (CAN). By broadcasting packets to their bus, the CAN facilitates the interaction between Electronic Control Units (ECU) that coordinate, monitor and control internal vehicle components. With no authentication mechanism for identifying the legitimacy and source of packets, CAN are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. An Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can detect attacks on CAN and machine learning can be used to create the models for the IDSs to detect non-linear attack patterns. However, car manufacturers and owners might want to keep the sensitive information required for training the models confidential. Therefore, we proposed a Blockchain-based Federated Forest Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-enabled IDS (BFF-IDS) to address the problem of data sharing the sensitive CAN data. To ensure scalability, we used InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to host the models, and the blockchain is designed to store only a hash of the model and a pointer to its location. The SDN provides the dynamic routing of packets and model exchanges. We used Federated Learning (FL) to create a random forest model. Individuals provide partially trained models, allowing them to keep the underlying data confidential. Using Fourier transform, we decomposed the CAN IDs cycle from CAN bus traffic in the frequency domain for better generalization in multiclass detection of attacks. Multiple statistical and entropy features were extracted to handle the high complexity and non-linearity in CAN bus traffic. The proposed system allows manufacturers and car owners to contribute to the training of the models, as their sensitive data is protected. By storing hashes of the models on a blockchain, the risk of adversaries poisoning the models is reduced and a single point of failure is avoided. We evaluated the proposed system by conducting experiments on a testbed. We found that the proposed system has efficient use of memory and CPU resources and that the detection rate of closely related attacks was high. We recorded the highest model attack detection rate of about 0.981.

Xia Feng, Qichen Shi, Qingqing Xie, Liangmin Wang

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) supporting the seamless operation of autonomous vehicles introduce various network-connected devices. The widespread devices are engaged in VANETs so that users can enjoy advantageous computing and reliable services. The combination brings in massive real-time message propagation and dissemination, which would be leveraged by the adversaries to perform data association, integration analysis and privacy mining. To address such challenges, existing authentication schemes use n pseudonym certificates for pre-defined k times and try to keep the vehicles anonymous. These schemes require fresh certificates for each authentication process, which cost more communication and storage resources. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-preserving authentication protocol (P2BA) in bilinear groups, where a registered vehicle signs a traffic-related message and sends it to the nearby Road-side Unit (RSU) together with its blinded certificate. The RSU is able to independently check the message for validity based on a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof protocol. In this way, the computation time has been reduced fromO(n) toO(1) while the storage overhead fromO(nk) toO(n) compared to anonymous authentication protocols. Moreover, our scheme provides privacy properties such as anonymity and unlinkability. The simulations show that the message authentication can be processed by individual RSUs within 1 ms under the batch-enabled scheme, which outperforms the existing schemes in terms of computation overhead and latency.

Ovidiu Vermesan, Reiner John, Patrick Pype, G. H. O. Daalderop · 8 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Xianjia Yu, Jorge Peña Queralta, Jukka Heikkonen, Tomi Westerlund

Autonomous systems are becoming inherently ubiquitous with the advancements of computing and communication solutions enabling low-latency offloading and real-time collaboration of distributed devices. Decentralized technologies with blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) are playing a key role. At the same time, advances in deep learning (DL) have significantly raised the degree of autonomy and level of intelligence of robotic and autonomous systems. While these technological revolutions were taking place, raising concerns in terms of data security and end-user privacy has become an inescapable research consideration. Federated learning (FL) is a promising solution to privacy-preserving DL at the edge, with an inherently distributed nature by learning on isolated data islands and communicating only model updates. However, FL by itself does not provide the levels of security and robustness required by today’s standards in distributed autonomous systems. This survey covers applications of FL to autonomous robots, analyzes the role of DLT and FL for these systems, and introduces the key background concepts and considerations in current research.

Fares Nabil ElAmine

With the recent advancements in the networking realm of computers as well as achieving real-time communication between devices over the Internet, IoT (Internet of Things) devices have been on the rise; collecting, sharing, and exchanging data with other connected devices or databases online, enabling all sorts of communications and operations without the need for human intervention, oversight, or control. This has caused more computer-based systems to get integrated into the physical world, inching us closer towards developing smart cities. The automotive industry, alongside other software developers and technology companies have been at the forefront of this advancement towards achieving smart cities. Currently, transportation networks need to be revamped to utilize the massive amounts of data being generated by the public’s vehicle’s on-board devices, as well as other integrated sensors on public transit systems, local roads, and highways. This will create an interconnected ecosystem that can be leveraged to improve traffic efficiency and reliability. Currently, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communications, all play a major role in supporting road safety, traffic efficiency, and energy savings. To protect these devices and the networks they form from being targets of cyber-related attacks, this paper presents ideas on how to leverage distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to establish secure communication between vehicles that is decentralized, trustless, and immutable. Incorporating IOTA’s protocols, as well as utilizing Ethereum’s smart contracts functionality and application concepts with VANETs, all interoperating with Hyperledger’s Fabric framework, several novel ideas can be implemented to improve traffic safety and efficiency. Such a modular design also opens up the possibility to further investigate use cases of the blockchain and distributed ledger technologies in creating a decentralized intelligent transportation system (ITS).

Andrea Tesei, Domenico Lattuca, Alexandr Tardo, Luca Di Mauro · 8 authors

Major maritime carriers are globally demanding improvements in the efficiency of port operations. Cargo carried by ships must be loaded and unloaded quickly with minimal stopover time in the port. This requirement mandates seaports to deploy cutting-edge technology to the port area so that logistic processes are increasingly efficient and reliable. In this scenario, the attack surface of such critical infrastructure is growing very rapidly and advanced security techniques must be deployed to enforce a high attack resilience. A Distributed Ledger-based Credential Management System exploiting a Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to enable transparent and real-time tracking of logistic vehicles and cargos within a terminal is presented in this paper. Based on a customization of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) security standards, the proposed scheme provides authentication, authorization, and revocation capabilities to promptly exclude misbehaving logistic vehicles from the system, while maintaining an immutable record of all the logistic vehicles' activity. The laboratory validation demonstrates that the delay of the devised scheme is not dependent on the quay area capacity, thus being applicable in seaports of any size. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the solution is demonstrated with the field trial results obtained with the EU Horizon 2020 COREALIS project testbed deployed in the Port of Livorno.

Christoph Egger, Mike Graf, Ralf Küsters, Daniel Rausch · 6 authors

In the past few years blockchains have been a major focus for security research, resulting in significant progress in the design, formalization, and analysis of blockchain protocols. However, the more general class of distributed ledgers, which includes not just blockchains but also prominent non-blockchain protocols, such as Corda and OmniLedger, cannot be covered by the state-of-the-art in the security literature yet. These distributed ledgers often break with traditional blockchain paradigms, such as block structures to store data, system-wide consensus, or global consistency. In this paper, we close this gap by proposing the first framework for defining and analyzing the security of general distributed ledgers, with an ideal distributed ledger functionality, called Fledger, at the core of our contribution. This functionality covers not only classical blockchains but also non-blockchain distributed ledgers in a unified way. To illustrate Fledger, we first show that the prominent ideal block-chain functionalities Gledger and GPL realize (suitable instantiations of) Fledger, which captures their security properties. This implies that their respective implementations, including Bitcoin, Ouroboros Genesis, and Ouroboros Crypsinous, realize Fledger as well. Secondly, we demonstrate that Fledger is capable of precisely modeling also non-blockchain distributed ledgers by performing the first formal security analysis of such a distributed ledger, namely the prominent Corda protocol. Due to the wide spread use of Corda in industry, in particular the financial sector, this analysis is of independent interest. These results also illustrate that Fledger not just generalizes the modular treatment of blockchains to distributed ledgers, but moreover helps to unify existing results.

Naipeng Dong, Babu Pillai, Guangdong Bai, Mark Utting

Abstract Distributed ledger technology (DLT) emerged as a disruptive force towards decentralization and has expanded beyond its origins in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. At the heart of DLT is an infrastructure that replicates data across multiple network nodes, enabling new opportunities for data integrity, transparency, and trust in distributed business environments. In recent years, technological advances have improved the performance, energy efficiency, and functionality of DLT, expanding its application to various sectors such as finance, healthcare, trade and media, logistics, and the public sector. Despite these advances, adoption remained limited, with notable successes primarily in areas such as decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens. By placing DLT within the historical development of ledgers and distributed databases, this Fundamental provides a business-oriented foundation for structuring and assessing DLT-based solutions. It presents, a unified definition covering blockchain technologies, describes the key characteristics of DLT, and offers a structured analysis of its potential and challenges using a multi-dimensional interaction framework. Ultimately, it serves to carve out where and under which conditions DLT infrastructures add value for interorganizational relationships.

Adia Khalid, Muhammad Sohaib Iftikhar, Ahmad Almogren, Rabiya Khalid · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Shupeng Wang, Shouming Sun, Xiaojie Wang, Zhaolong Ning · 5 authors

Vehicular crowdsensing has been widely leveraged in the intelligent transportation systems to collect real-time traffic data. However, the data security and privacy preservation issues have not been well investigated for vehicular crowdsensing. This article proposes a blockchain-enabled vehicular crowdsensing system to protect user privacy and data safety in 5G Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In order to maximize the security and minimize the latency of blockchain, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL)-enabled algorithm is proposed to select proper active miners and transactions. Then, a two-sided matching-based algorithm is put forwarded to allocate the nonorthogonal multiple access subchannels to minimize the maximum uploading delay of all users to guarantee the freshness of messages. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our system. Finally, system analysis demonstrates that our system can protect user privacy, guarantee data security as well as integrity, and defend against common attacks. With the development of information communication techniques, vehicular crowdsensing is widely leveraged in the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) to collect real-time traffic information (e.g., traffic accidents and jams). Recently, vehicles have begun to be regarded as the consumer electronics product, due to the advancements in the development of autonomous vehicles, and users in vehicular crowdsensing focus more and more on their privacy protection and data security. In order to guarantee the connectivity and communication of users participating in the vehicular crowdsensing, intelligent management of network traffic and offering services to vehicles has become a vital need, especially for the highly dynamic topology and untrusty communication environment in 5G Internet of Vehicles (IoV).1 However, the vehicular crowdsensing-based data collection and transmission in 5G IoVs face the following major challenges:

Heena Rathore, Abhay Samant, Murtuza Jadliwala

Connected vehicles are set to define the future of transportation; however, this upcoming technology continues to be plagued with serious security risks. If these risks are not addressed in a timely fashion, then they could threaten the adoption and success of this promising technology. This article deals with a specific class of attacks in connected vehicles, namely tampering attacks caused due to compromise of on-board sensors. Current centralized solutions that employ trusted infrastructure to protect against adversarial manipulation of information cannot validate the correctness of the shared data and do not scale well. To overcome these issues, decentralized protection mechanisms by means of blockchain technology have emerged as a promising research direction. However, current permission-less, linear blockchain-based solutions have low transaction performance and high computational cost, thereby making it difficult to adopt them for security in connected vehicles. In this article, we present TangleCV, a directed acyclic graph–based distributed ledger technique for connected vehicles to address data tampering threats in connected vehicular networks. We describe new validation steps, tip selection strategies, and cumulative weight definition for TangleCV that not only meets the timing constraints of the connected vehicular networks but also secures the network against threats due to tampering attacks. We describe how the reputation of the network is established in TangleCV using trust factors calculated on the basis of ability, integrity, and benevolence of the nodes in the network. We present numerical results that demonstrate that the average value of the time to first approval decreases by more than 70% as the network evolves from a low load to a high load in the case of the nearest neighbor strategy. We observe that more than 60% of the nodes are approved in a low-load network and this number increases to 80% in a high-load network for the nearest neighbor strategy. The standard deviation of error measurements for nodes experiencing tampering attack is around 60% higher as compared to nodes that do not experience such an attack.

Ayesha Sadiq, Muhammad Umar Javed, Rabiya Khalid, Ahmad Almogren · 6 authors

The drastic increase in real-time vehicle generated data of various types has imparted a great concept of data trading in vehicular networks. Whereas immense usage of Electric Vehicles (EVs) as mobile energy carriers have supported distributed energy trading due to their bidirectional charging and discharging capabilities. The trustless environment of Internet of Electric Vehicles (IoEV), including fuel vehicles and EVs, encounters trading disputes and conflicting interests among trading parties. To address these challenges, we exploit consortium blockchain to maintain transparency and trust in trading activities. Smart contracts are used to tackle trading disputes and illegal actions. Data duplication problem occurs when a dishonest user sell previously traded data multiple times for financial gain. Therefore, data duplication validation is done through previously stored hash-list at roadside units (RSUs) employed with bloom filters for efficient data lookup. Removing data duplication at an earlier stage reduces storage cost. Moreover, an elliptic curve bilinear pairing based digital signature scheme is used to ensure the reliability and integrity of traded data. To ensure persistent availability of traded data, InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is used, which provides fault-tolerant and a reliable data storage without any single point of failure. On the other hand, the energy trading transactions among EVs face some security and privacy protection challenges. An adversary can infer the energy trading records of EVs, and launch the data linkage attacks. To address this issue, an account generation technique is used that hides the energy trading trends. The new account generation for an EV depends upon its traded volume of energy. The experimental results verify the efficiency of the proposed data and energy trading scheme in IoEV with the reliable and secure data storage.

Isaac Agudo, Manuel Montenegro-Gomez, Javier López

New mobility paradigms have appeared in recent years, and everything suggests that some more are coming. This fact makes apparent the necessity of modernizing the road infrastructure, the signalling elements and the traffic management systems. Many initiatives have emerged around the term Intelligent Transport System (ITS) in order to define new scenarios and requirements for this kind of applications. We even have two main competing technologies for implementing Vehicular communication protocols (V2X), C-V2X and 802.11p, but neither of them is widely deployed yet. One of the main barriers for the massive adoption of those technologies is governance. Current solutions rely on the use of a public key infrastructure that enables secure collaboration between the different entities in the V2X ecosystem, but given its global scope, managing such infrastructure requires reaching agreements between many parties, with conflicts of interest between automakers and telecommunication operators. As a result, there are plenty of use cases available and two mature communication technologies, but the complexity at the business layer is stopping the drivers from taking advantage of ITS applications. Blockchain technologies are defining a new decentralized paradigm for most traditional applications, where smart contracts provide a straightforward mechanism for decentralized governance. In this work, we propose an approach for decentralized V2X (D-V2X) that does not require any trusted authority and can be implemented on top of any communication protocol. We also define a proof-of-concept technical architecture on top of a cheap and highly secure System-on-Chip (SoC) that could allow for massive adoption of D-V2X.