Jiao Liu, Xinghua Li, Qi Jiang, Mohammad S. Obaidat ยท 5 authors
Authentication with unlinkability is one of the critical requirements for the security of VANETs. Unlinkability prevents attackers from linking multiple messages to infer vehicular privacy. Pseudonymous authentication schemes are widely adopted to achieve unlinkable authentication. However, they need multiple interactions with a trusted third-party to update pseudonym as well as the attached information. In order to address this issue and provide effective services in distributed systems, we propose a blockchain-based unlinkable authentication protocol called BUA, where Service Manager (SM) of each domain acts as the nodes of consortium blockchain to construct a distributed system. Each SM covers a certain logical area and maintains a sequence of consistent blocks, which hold vehicular registration data. Based on the system, vehicles use homomorphic encryption to self-generate any number of pseudonyms to achieve unlinkability. Pseudonymous validity and ownership can be verified locally by each SM. Performance evaluation results of the proposed scheme show that our protocol provides stronger security with less computation and communication overhead.
Tharaka Hewa, An Bracken, Mika Ylianttila, Madhusanka Liyanage
Internet of Things (IoT) is a key topic of interest in modern communication context with the evolution of 5G and beyond ecosystems. 5G will interconnects billions of IoT devices wirelessly. The wireless communication exposes the devices to massive security risks in different dimensions. The Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is one of the promising solutions to eliminate security risks. It ensures the authentication and communication integrity by using public key certificates. However, the overhead of certificate storage is a significant problem for the resource constrained IoT devices. We propose an application of Elliptic Curve Qu Vanstone (ECQV) certificates, which are lightweight in size for the resource restricted IoT devices. Furthermore, we incorporate the blockchain based smart contracts to handle the certificate related operations. We utilize the smart contracts in the certificate issuance and developed a smart contract based threat scoring mechanism to automatically revoke the certificates. The lightweight nature of ECQV certificates enables the distributed ledger to store, update, and revoke the certificates. We evaluated the proposed solution in Hyperledger Fabric blockchain platform.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The platoon-based driving pattern, a cooperative driving pattern for a leader and a number of followers, is a good way to deal with some traditional traffic issues and brings many benefits when performing special platoon tasks. However, it's possible for each platoon member to be fully controlled by attackers, especially the leader, which may cause severe damage to the platoon stability. In this paper, we propose a vehicle platoon leader updating scheme in vehicular networks based on blockchain techniques and reputation management mechanism, so as to ensure that the most trusted platoon member acts as leader. In this scheme, according to received warning messages of traffic events, each platoon member evaluates others' reputations in the form of offsets. Using the designed reputation blockchain with Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus scheme, miners generate blocks in turn and wait for others' verification. If a block successfully passes the consensus process, it will be formally added to the blockchain, which can reflect all platoon members' current reputation values. In addition, we also have to guarantee that the miner group is composed of several platoon members with high reputation and the leader serves as a miner. In this way, the scheme both meets the real-time requirement of reputation management and saves communication overhead compared with existing schemes. Finally, we analyze the proper functioning and security of our proposed scheme.
Ahmad Hammoud, Hani Sami, Azzam Mourad, Hadi Otrok ยท 6 authors
Internet of Things (IoT) is turning into an undeniably developing point of discussion in both research and industrial fields. A key area that is witnessing a quick development in the utilization of IoT devices is the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which allows information exchange among vehicles and infrastructures. Notably, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been widely adopted for solving challenging vehicular problems and managing the IoV infrastructure. Despite the advantages AI carries for IoV, its deployment can be negatively affected by lacking computation resources and processing unreliable data. On the other hand, Blockchain is a decentralized and distributed peer-to-peer network architecture that can be employed to empower security and resist against undesirable data modification. However, integrating both technologies (i.e., AI and Blockchain) exhausts, even more, the IoV infrastructure. Therefore, we present in this paper an overview discussing the AI and Blockchain approaches and models for IoV and propose a new Vehicular Edge Computing based architecture embedding both technologies and overcoming the aforementioned limitations. We then discuss the main challenges and give notice to the concerned parties and stakeholders about promising directions that arise from enabling the three technologies for providing smart, secure, and efficient IoV.
Driving to the research trend to the Internet of Vehicle (IoV), the issues of privacy and security of each internet car become popular. We focus on the certificate management to reduce the cost of certificate validation securely. In this paper, we use the blockchain technology to address the distribution and management of the Certificate Revocation List (CRL) in vehicle public key infrastructure (PKI). Our proposed scheme uses the activation codes to validate the certificate depends on time to non-revoked vehicle for blockchain mechanism. We intend to reduce the verification cost and naturally remove the certificate of inactive cars.
Smart vehicles determine and take various actions with state information with little or no human intervention. More information can be gathered when they can connect to and communicate with other vehicles and their environments, improving safe self-driving. This paper proposes a blockchain-based information sharing that verifies the shared data and the sharing process using a public blockchain, Ethereum. To protect the privacy of the shared information, cryptography and secure protocols are additionally applied to the blockchain technology.
Yuhong Li, Kun Ouyang, Nanxuan Li, Rahim Rahmani ยท 6 authors
Being able to obtain various environmental and driving data from vehicles is becoming more and more important for current and future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) to operate efficiently and economically. However, the limitations of privacy protection and security of the current ITSs are hindering users and vehicles from providing data. In this paper, we propose a new ITS architecture by using blockchain technology solving the privacy protection and security problems, and promoting users and vehicles to provide data to ITSs. The proposed architecture uses blockchain as a trust infrastructure to protect users' privacy and provide trustworthy services to users. It is also compatible with the legacy ITS infrastructure and services. In addition, the hierarchical organization of chains enables the scalability of the system, and the use of smart contracts provides a flexible way for introducing new services in the ITS. The proposed architecture is demonstrated by a proof of concept implementation based on Ethereum. The test results show that the proposed architecture is feasible.
We propose an autonomous blockchain-based federated learning (BFL) design for privacy-aware and efficient vehicular communication networking, where local on-vehicle machine learning (oVML) model updates are exchanged and verified in a distributed fashion. BFL enables oVML without any centralized training data or coordination by utilizing the consensus mechanism of the blockchain. Relying on a renewal reward approach, we develop a mathematical framework that features the controllable network and BFL parameters (e.g., the retransmission limit, block size, block arrival rate, and the frame sizes) so as to capture their impact on the system-level performance. More importantly, our rigorous analysis of oVML system dynamics quantifies the end-to-end delay with BFL, which provides important insights into deriving optimal block arrival rate by considering communication and consensus delays. We present a variety of numerical and simulation results highlighting various non-trivial findings and insights for adaptive BFL design. In particular, based on analytical results, we minimize the system delay by exploiting the channel dynamics and demonstrate that the proposed idea of tuning the block arrival rate is provably online and capable of driving the system dynamics to the desired operating point. It also identifies the improved dependency on other blockchain parameters for a given set of channel conditions, retransmission limits, and frame sizes.1However, a number of challenges (gaps in knowledge) need to be resolved in order to realise these changes. In particular, we identify key bottleneck challenges requiring further investigations, and provide potential future research directions.1An early version of this work has been accepted for presentation in IEEE WCNC Wksps 2020 [1].
Ronghua Xu, Yu Chen, Erik Blasch, Alexander Aved ยท 6 authors
Advancement in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), dynamic data driven application systems (DDDAS), and hierarchical cloud-fog-edge computing paradigm provide opportunities for enhancing multi-domain systems performance. As one example that represents multi-domain scenario, a "fly-by-feel" system utilizes DDDAS framework to support autonomous operations and improve maneuverability, safety and fuel efficiency. The DDDAS "fly-by-feel" avionics system can enhance multi-domain coordination to support domain specific operations. However, conventional enabling technologies rely on a centralized manner for data aggregation, sharing and security policy enforcement, and it incurs critical issues related to bottleneck of performance, data provenance and consistency. Inspired by the containerized microservices and blockchain technology, this paper introduces BLEM, a hybrid BLockchain-Enabled secure Microservices fabric to support decentralized, secure and efficient data fusion and multi-domain operations for avionics systems. Leveraging the fine-granularity and loose-coupling features of the microservices architecture, multidomain operations and security functionalities are decoupled into multiple containerized microservices. A hybrid blockchain fabric based on two-level committee consensus protocols is proposed to enable decentralized security architecture and support immutability, auditability and traceability for data provenience in existing multi-domain avionics system. Our evaluation results show the feasibility of the proposed BLEM mechanism to support decentralized security service and guarantee immutability, auditability and traceability for data provenience across domain boundaries.
Vehicular sensing is advocated to perform data collection by exploiting a plethora of vehicular on-board sensors; meanwhile, with the merging of vehicular sensing and fog computing, the deployed road side units (RSUs) can act as fog nodes to collect and share vehicular sensory data at the network edge. However, there are still several problems in terms of the secure and reliable sharing of sensory data in vehicular fog. To resolve these issues, in this paper, we present an efficient, privacy-preserving and verifiable sensory data collection and sharing scheme with a permissioned blockchain in vehicular fog. During the data collection phase, by combining the homomorphic 2-DNF (Disjunctive Normal Form) cryptosystem and an identity-based signcryption scheme, our proposed scheme achieves the secure and verifiable computation of the average and variance of the collected vehicular sensory data. Meanwhile, to achieve efficient and reliable data sharing, we exploit a permissioned blockchain to maintain an immutable and tamper-proof record of the derived sensory data. Security analysis demonstrates the security properties of the proposed scheme, in terms of location privacy preservation, verifiability and immutability. Performance evaluations are conducted to validate the efficiency of the proposed scheme, i.e., improvements in computation and communication efficiency in comparison with a scheme without exploiting blockchain.
N. Padmapriya, T. Ananth Kumar, R. Rajmohan, M. Pavithra ยท 5 authors
<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">The cars we drive are rapidly transforming. Connected vehicles in the context of the Advanced Driver Assistance System or Autonomous Vehicles are about to change the way we drive cars. Connected Vehicles are futuristic vehicles that can interact with other vehicles for passing on information such as, mapping and localization, information about road traffic and driving behaviour. However, such vehicles, particularly the autonomous ones, are prone to a variety of attacks including cyber-attacks. These malicious attacks can intrude a vehicle that not only endangers the vehicles safety, but also the life of passengers and the nearby environment. Thus, identifying and eliminating these attacks for providing a secure communication environment is of great need. Also, all the existing methods for vehicular communication rely on a centralized server which itself invite massive cyber-security threats. These threats and challenges can be addressed by using the Blockchain (BC) technology, where each transaction is logged in a decentralized immutable BC ledger. In this work, we show how BC can facilitate communication between connected vehicles to send and receive information while assuring the security of all the vehicles participating in the BC network. First, we developed an application for the blockchain based less-complex Proof-of-Work consensus method that allows the vehicles to transfer information in a secured manner. Second, we demonstrate the working of the application using raspberry pi board that act as vehicles mounted with sensors and two computers that act as blockchain network. Finally, we discuss the advantages and disadvantages of blockchain based vehicular communication and the integration of the blockchain with VANET as well.</div></div>
<div class="section abstract"><div class="htmlview paragraph">The automotive industry is set for a rapid transformation in the next few years in terms of communication. The kind of growth the automotive industry is poised for in fields of connected cars is both fascinating and alarming at the same time. The communication devices equipped to the cars and the data exchanges done between vehicles to vehicles are prone to a lot of cyber-related attacks. The signals that are sent using Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET) between vehicles can be eavesdropped by the attackers and it may be used for various attacks such as the man in the middle attack, DOS attack, Sybil attack, etc. These attacks can be prevented using the Blockchain technology, where each transaction is logged in a decentralized immutable Blockchain ledger. This provides authenticity and integrity to the signals. But the use of Blockchain Platforms such as Ethereum has various drawbacks like scalability which makes it infeasible for connected car system. Here, we propose a solution to address various drawbacks of VANET such as privacy issues and, security using a more scalable decentralized platform called IOTA incorporated with a Public Key Infrastructure.</div></div>
Jie Xu, Kaiping Xue, Hangyu Tian, Jianan Hong ยท 6 authors
More and more users are eager to obtain more comprehensive network services without revealing their private information. Traditionally, in order to access a network, a user is authorized with an identity and corresponding keys, which are generated and managed by the network operator. All users' personally identifying information are centralized stored by the network operator. However, this approach makes users lose the control of their personally identifying information. Users are concerned about who can access these sensitive data and whether they have been compromised. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based identity management and authentication scheme for mobile networks, where users' identifying information are controlled by the users themselves. Our scheme let users generate their self-sovereign identities (SSIs) and corresponding public keys and private keys. The private key used to authenticate the user's identifying information is only known to the user. We use blockchain to record SSIs and public keys of legitimate user, and adopt chameleon hash to delete illegal users' information on the blockchain, while keeping the block head unchanged. Furthermore, other service providers can obtain the user's SSI and public key and authenticate users by querying the blockchain. Experimental results confirm that our scheme can greatly reduce the revocation overhead and communication overhead.
The fast penetration of Intelligent Connected Vehicles (ICVs) has become the primary growth engine of the automotive industry in recent years. Urban vehicular network consisting of ICVs is evolving towards a distributed intelligent platform for pervasive sensing, connecting and computing in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) and smart cities. In this paper, we propose that parked vehicles (PVs) could be exploited for environment perception and model inference. We describe the system architecture and its typical application scenarios of distributed environment perception for city roads, parking lots, as well as for commercial and residential buildings. PVs are motivated to assist in deep learning model inference for the captured image data in such applications. Regarding the diversity of PVs in deep learning capability, a differential incentive mechanism is elaborately designed based on contract theory to emulate PVsparticipation. The experiment on the dataset of German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark is conducted to verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approach.
Security-related data collection is an essential part for attack detection and security measurement in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). Due to no fixed infrastructure of MANETs, a detection node playing as a collector should discover available routes to a collection node for data collection. Notably, route discovery suffers from many attacks (e.g., wormhole attack), thus the detection node should also collect securityrelated data during route discovery and analyze these data for determining reliable routes. However, few literatures provide incentives for security-related data collection in MANETs, and thus the detection node might not collect sufficient data, which greatly impacts the accuracy of attack detection and security measurement. In this paper, we propose B4SDC, a blockchain system for security-related data collection in MANETs. Through controlling the scale of RREQ forwarding in route discovery, the collector can constrain its payment and simultaneously make each forwarder of control information (namely RREQs and RREPs) obtain rewards as much as possible to ensure fairness. At the same time, B4SDC avoids collusion attacks with cooperative receipt reporting, and spoofing attacks by adopting a secure digital signature. Based on a novel Proof-of-Stake consensus mechanism by accumulating stakes through message forwarding, B4SDC not only provides incentives for all participating nodes, but also avoids forking and ensures high efficiency and real decentralization at the same time. We analyze B4SDC in terms of incentives and security, and evaluate its performance through simulations. The thorough analysis and experimental results show the efficacy and effectiveness of B4SDC.
The rapid development of 5G networks has made smart driving possible. The vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are the main environment for smart driving, providing road information, instant communication between vehicle and vehicle (V2V) or vehicle and infrastructure (V2I). The information interaction security of VANETs is critical to the proper functioning of the traffic. Much research in recent years has focused on secure communication in VANETs, especially the secure V2V or V2I communications. However, current security schemes often require complex identity re-authentication when vehicles enter a new infrastructure coverage, which greatly reduces the efficiency of the entire network. In addition, the emergence of blockchain has created opportunities to overcome the challenges in VANETs mentioned above. In this article, blockchain is utilized to enhance the scalability of the trustworthiness scalable computation. The proposed blockchain assisted trustworthiness scalable computation based V2I authentication (B-TSCA) scheme achieves rapid re-authentication of vehicles through secure ownership transfer between infrastructures. Note that, trustworthiness scalable computation assisted by blockchian technology ensures the decentralization and non tamperability of the scalable computation result. The security analysis indicates that B-TSCA scheme is a CDH-secure scheme. The time cost of the novel handover authentication phase is half of that of the initial one as is presented in the simulation.
Muhammad Umar Javed, Mubariz Rehman, Nadeem Javaid, Abdulaziz Aldegheishem ยท 6 authors
In this paper, a blockchain-based secure data sharing mechanism is proposed for Vehicular Networks (VNs). Edge service providers are introduced along with ordinary nodes to efficiently manage service provisioning. The edge service providers are placed in the neighborhood of the ordinary nodes to ensure smooth communication between them. The huge amount of data generated by smart vehicles is stored in a distributed file storage system, known as Interplanetary File System (IPFS). It is used to tackle the issues related to data storage in centralized architectures, such as data tampering, lack of privacy, vulnerability to hackers, etc. Monetary incentives are given to edge vehicle nodes to motivate them for accurate and timely service provisioning to ordinary nodes. In response, ordinary nodes give reviews to the edge nodes against the services provided by them, which are further stored in a blockchain to ensure integrity, security and transparency. Smart contracts are used to automate the system processes without the inclusion of an intermediate party and to check the reviews given to the edge nodes. To optimize gas consumption and to enhance the system performance, a Proof of Authority (PoA) consensus mechanism is used to validate the transactions. Moreover, a caching system is introduced at the edge nodes to store frequently used services. Furthermore, both security and privacy are enhanced in the proposed system by incorporating a symmetric key cryptographic mechanism. A trust management mechanism is also proposed in this work to calculate the nodesโ reputation values based upon their trust values. These values determine the authenticity of the nodes involved in the network. Eventually, it is concluded from the simulation results that the proposed system is efficient for VNs.
In disaster areas, a large amount of data (e.g., rescue commands, road damage, and rescue experience) should be delivered among ground rescuing vehicles for safe driving and efficient rescue. When communication infrastructures are destroyed by disasters, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be employed to perform immediate rescue missions in destroyed areas and assist data sharing for ground Internet of vehicles (IoV). However, in such UAV-assisted IoV under disaster situation, there exist potential security threats on data sharing among vehicles and UAVs because of the untrusted network environment, unreliable misbehavior tracing, and low-quality shared data. To address these issues, in this article, we develop alightweightvehicularblockchain-enabledsecure (LVBS) data sharing framework in UAV-aided IoV for disaster rescue. First, we propose a novel UAV and blockchain-assisted collaborative aerial-ground network architecture in disaster areas. Second, we develop a credit-based consensus algorithm in the lightweight vehicular blockchain to securely and immutably trace misbehaviors and record data transactions for UAVs and vehicles with improved efficiency and security in reaching consensus. Third, since UAVs and vehicles have little explicit knowledge of the whole network, we develop reinforcement learning-based algorithms to optimally schedule the pricing and quality of data sharing strategies for both data contributor and data consumer via trial and error. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted, which demonstrate that LVBS can effectively improve the security of consensus phase and promote high-quality data sharing.
Danda B. Rawat, Ronald Doku, Abdulhamid Adebayo, Chandra Bajracharya ยท 5 authors
A huge amount of information is expected to be exchanged in vehicular networks through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications for enhancing overall traffic efficiency and road safety. However, there are several critical challenges to be addressed before completely realizing the full potential of V2X networking. Privacy-aware security is one of the central components to be addressed for V2X communications. This paper presents a novel framework by leveraging the best features of two emerging technologies: blockchain technology and named data networking (NDN) for privacy-aware secure V2X communications. The proposed framework does not use the private information of users (owners, drivers, pedestrians, passengers, cyclists, etc.) in vehicular networks while providing verifiable secure V2X communications by using non-private information such as number plate of the vehicle (like in ParkMobile App or E-ZPass systems use) for integrity and accountability of the communications. Specifically, integrity and accountability in the proposed framework for its users are achieved by amalgamating the best features of blockchain technology and NDN. Furthermore, the proposed approach aims to increase the trust and transparency and reduce the business friction in smart transplantation systems.
With the increasing interest in connected vehicles along with electrification opportunities, there is an ongoing effort to automate the charging process of electric vehicles (EVs) through their capabilities to communicate with the infrastructure and each other. However, charging EVs takes time and thus in-advance scheduling is needed. As this process is done frequently due to limited mileage per charge on EVs, it may expose the locations and charging pattern of the EV to the service providers, raising privacy concerns for their users. Nevertheless, the EV still needs to be authenticated to charging providers, which means some information will need to be provided anyway. While there have been many studies to address the problem of privacy-preserving authentication for vehicular networks, such solutions will be void if charging payments are made through traditional means. In this paper, we tackle this problem by utilizing distributed applications enabled by Blockchain and smart contracts. We adapt zero-knowledge proofs to Blockchain for enabling privacy-preserving authentication while removing the need for a central authority. We introduce two approaches, one using a token-based mechanism and another utilizing the Pederson Commitment scheme to realize anonymous authentication. We also describe a protocol for the whole process which includes scheduling and charging operations. The evaluation of the proposed approaches indicates that the overhead of this process is affordable to enable real-time charging operations for connected EVs.