Blockchain Papers

Qiu-Yue Han, Yang Yang, Zhiyuan Ma, Jiangfeng Li · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Mirko Zichichi, Stefano Ferretti, Gabriele D’Angelo

Data are becoming the cornerstone of many businesses and entire systems infrastructure. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are no different. The ability of intelligent vehicles and devices to acquire and share environmental measurements in the form of data is leading to the creation of smart services for the benefit of individuals. In this paper, we present a system architecture to promote the development of ITS using distributed ledgers and related technologies. Thanks to these, it becomes possible to create, store and share data generated by users through the sensors on their devices or vehicles, while on the move. We propose an architecture based on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) to offer features such as immutability, traceability and verifiability of data. IOTA, a promising DLT for IoT, is used together with Decentralized File Storages (DFSes) to store and certify data (and their related metadata) coming from vehicles or by the users' devices themselves (smartphones). Ethereum is then exploited as the smart contract platform that coordinates the data sharing through access control mechanisms. Privacy guarantees are provided by the usage of distributed key management systems and Zero Knowledge Proof. We provide experimental results of a testbed based on real traces, in order to understand if DLT and DFS technologies are ready to support complex services, such as those that pertain to ITS. Results clearly show that, while the viability of the proposal cannot be rejected, further work is needed on the responsiveness of DLT infrastructures.

Yi Yang, Debiao He, Huaqun Wang, Lu Zhou

Abstract As an important branch of the Internet of Things (IoT), Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have attracted wide attention from industrial and academic. Due to an opening wireless channel, the security and efficiency of VANETs have also become serious. To enhance the security and efficiency, various batch verification schemes have been proposed. However, most of those schemes suffer from the complicated certificate management problem or different kinds of attacks. Also,the bilinear pairing which is intractable for lightweight devices in VANETs usually be used inthose schemes. To solve the above problems, we propose an efficient blockchain‐based batch verification scheme for VANETs using the Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC). We also provide security analysis to show its ability to resist current known attacks. Besides, we have implemented corresponding blockchain system and the performance analysis shows that it is suitable for VANETs.

Haowen Tan, Ilyong Chung

Nowadays, with rapid advancements of vehicular telematics and communication techniques, proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been witnessed, which facilitates the construction of promising intelligent transportation system (ITS). Due to inherent wireless communicating features in open environment, secure transmission among numerous VANET entities remains crucial issues. Currently, lots of research efforts have been made, while most of which tend to allocate the universal group key to the verified devices for both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-RSU (V2R) communications. However, in heterogeneous VANET environment with large numbers of devices in same vehicular group, complicated and variable topologies lead to continuous key updating in every moment, causing interference to regular V2R data exchange, which is not reliable and efficient for resource-constrained VANET environment. Moreover, group membership recording and detecting mechanisms are necessary for real time vehicle revocation and participation, which has not been further studied so far. In this paper, we address the above issues by proposing a secure authentication and key management scheme. In our design, novel VANET system model with edge computing infrastructure is adopted so as to offer adequate computing and storing capacity compared to traditional VANET structure. Note that our certificateless authentication scheme applies the independent session key for each vehicle for interference avoidance. Furthermore, consortium blockchain is employed for V2V group key construction. Real time group membership arrangement with efficient group key updating is accordingly provided. Formal security proofs are presented, demonstrating that the proposed scheme can achieve desired security properties. Performance analysis is conducted as well, proving that the proposed scheme is efficient compared with the state-of-the-arts.

Lewis Nkenyereye, Bayu Adhi Tama, Muhammad K. Shahzad, Yoon-Ho Choi

Basic safety message (BSM) are messages that contain core elements of a vehicle such as vehicle's size, position, speed, acceleration and others. BSM are lightweight messages that can be regularly broadcast by the vehicles to enable a variety of applications. On the other hand, event-driven message (EDM) are messages generated at the time of occurrence such as accidents or roads sliding and can contain much more heavy elements including pictures, audio or videos. Security, architecture and communication solutions for BSM use cases have been largely documented on in the literature contrary to EDM due to several concerns such as the variant size of EDM, the appropriate architecture along with latency, privacy and security. In this paper, we propose a secure and blockchain based EDM protocol for 5G enabled vehicular edge computing. To offer scalability and latency for the proposed scenario, we adopt a 5G cellular architecture due to its projected features compared to 4G tong-term evaluation (LTE) for vehicular communications. We consider edge computing to provide local processing of EDM that can improve the response time of public agencies (ambulances or rescue teams) that may intervene to the scene. We make use of lightweight multi-receiver signcryption scheme without pairing that offers low time consuming operations, security, privacy and access control. EDM records need to be kept into a distributed system which can guarantee reliability and auditability of EDM. To achieve this, we construct a private blockchain based on the edge nodes to store EDM records. The performance analysis of the proposed protocol confirms its efficiency.

Yuling Chen, Xiaohan Hao, Wei Ren, Yi Ren

While key negotiation schemes, such as those based on Diffie–Hellman, have been the subject of ongoing research, designing an efficient and security scheme remains challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel key negotiation scheme based on blockchain, which can be deployed in blockchain-enabled contexts such as data sharing or facilitating electric transactions between vehicles (e.g., unmanned vehicles). We propose three candidates for flexible selection, namely, key exchanges via transaction currency values through value channels (such as the amount in transactions), automated key exchanges through static scripts,and dynamic scripts, which can not only guarantee key availability with timeliness but also defend against MITM (man-in-the-middle) attacks, packet-dropping attacks, and decryption failure attacks.

Bachira Guehguih, Hongwei Lu

The vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an intelligent transportation system application that aims to ensure the security of road traffic information over V2V communication and V2I communication. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based privacy-preserving authentication scheme in VANETs. We explore the strategy of a local blockchain for VANETs. We make use of a private blockchain for authentication and a public blockchain for managing event messages. The trusted authority (TA) is responsible for making the transactions in the private blockchain within the boundary of the countries, the transactions are the identity information required for authentication of vehicles when they join the network for the first time, the other vehicles have the right to read and check from the private blockchain the authenticity of a new vehicle. The public blockchain is used for storing the event messages within the boundary of pre-defined regions to ensure the security of message dissemination, we called this kind of blockchain road-side unit blockchain (RSU-BC) because it takes the role of RSU in a VANET. In this way, we eliminate the necessity of RSU's deployment in VANETs and reduce the dependency on the TA. By way of security analysis and security-proofing, we prove that our scheme satisfies multiple security and privacy requirements and can resist many attacks, while the performance analysis shows the efficiency of the scheme in terms of computation overheads and communication overheads.

Xingchen Liu, Haiping Huang, Fu Xiao, Ziyang Ma

As the infrastructure of the intelligent transportation system, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have greatly improved traffic efficiency. However, due to the openness characteristics of VANETs, trust and privacy are still two challenging issues in building a more secure network environment: it is difficult to protect the privacy of vehicles and meanwhile to determine whether the message sent by the vehicle is credible. In this article, a blockchain-based trust management model, combined with conditional privacy-preserving announcement scheme (BTCPS), is proposed for VANETs. First, an anonymous aggregate vehicular announcement protocol is designed to allow vehicles to send messages anonymously in the nonfully trusted environment to guarantee the privacy of the vehicle. Second, a blockchain-based trust management model is present to realize the message synchronization and credibility. Roadside units (RSUs) are able to calculate message reliability based on vehicles' reputation values which are safely stored in the blockchain. In addition, BTCPS also achieves conditional privacy since trusted authority can trace malicious vehicles' identities in anonymous announcements with the related public addresses. Finally, a mixed consensus algorithm based on proof-of-work and practical Byzantine fault tolerates algorithm is suggested for better efficiency. Security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the proposed scheme is secure and effective in VANETs.

Yang Yang, Jialiang Chen, Xianghan Zheng, Ximeng Liu · 6 authors

With the rapid development of computation and communication technologies, the traditional vehicle ad hoc networks (VANETs) are changing to Internet of vehicle (IoV). Vehicular announcement networks in IoV have been widely used in the communication of vehicles. Generally, we need to solve two problems while establishing a vehicular announcement system. First, we need to protect user's privacy when broadcasting the message. Second, participants usually lack the enthusiasm to reply to the announcement. To solve these two problems, we propose a novel blockchain-based incentive announcement system that not only allows participants to anonymously announce their message on the blockchain in a non-trusted environment, but also motivates witnesses to respond to the request of the traffic information with incentive mechanism. Meanwhile, traffic messages and signatures in our system are tamper-resistant, which are recorded on the blockchain. According to the security and performance analysis, it shows that our system is privacy-preserving and efficient in computation cost.

Wenbin Dong, Li Yang, Ronghui Hou, Xixiang Lv · 6 authors

The vehicular reputation management scheme based on blockchain has been studied with the rapidly development of blockchain technology. Existing works mainly focus on provisioning the security of the reputation management scheme by using the blockchain technology. However, the broadcast latency of blocks and the throughput capacity of the blockchain also have significant impacts on the performance of the reputation management scheme. This paper proposes a hierarchical blockchain based reputation management scheme in vehicular networks. Our hierarchical blockchain architecture assures that each vehicle can obtain the latest reputation value of any neighboring vehicle in a short time. Moreover, our designed blockchain structure aims at reducing the confirmation time of reputation values and increasing the capacity of blockchain. We finally conduct simulation experiments to compare our proposed scheme with the existing schemes.

Gautami Tripathi, Mohd Abdul Ahad, Mithileysh Sathiyanarayanan

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a dynamic network of vehicles connected together through sensors and communicating devices embedded in them. These embedded devices work in internal and external synchronization and consistency with each other. The functionality of the vehicles can be controlled, tracked and monitored through a remote controlling station. In recent years we have seen an exponential growth in the automobile sector where things are moving towards automation. Driverless cars and drones are no longer fictions, rather a reality now. There are several pertinent benefits of automation in the automobile industry like better designs, better safety features, better fuel efficiency, better pickup, reduced maintenance, safer driving experience etc. However, with these advantages and benefits, there are several issues and challenges associated with the internet of vehicles. This paper discusses the existing state of the Internet of Vehicles ecosystem and the important issues and challenges faced by the manufacturer as well as the consumers in the IoV systems. Furthermore, the paper also discusses the potential use of blockchain based solutions to overcome these limitations and challenges. The concept of Blockchain technology along with its key characteristics is discussed focusing on the integration of “Blockchain” technology with the “Internet of Things (IoT)” technology in the urban transportation system. The work presented focuses on the applications of blockchain in the IoV ecosystem. More specifically, the paper delves into the blockchain technology for securing the IoV network. Finally, the paper highlights some of the issues, challenges and opportunities associated with the blockchain based IoV systems.

Jianbin Gao, Kwame Opuni-Boachie Obour Agyekum, Emmanuel Boateng Sifah, Kingsley Nketia Acheampong · 8 authors

The goal of intelligent transport systems (ITSs) is to enhance the network performance of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Even though it presents new opportunities to the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) environment, there are some security concerns including the need to establish trust among the connected peers. The fifth-generation (5G) communication system, which provides reliable and low-latency communication services, is seen as the technology to cater for the challenges in VANETs. The incorporation of software-defined networks (SDNs) also ensures an effective network management. However, there should be monitoring and reporting services provided in the IoV. Blockchain, which has decentralization, transparency, and immutability as some of its properties, is designed to ensure trust in networking platforms. In that regard, this article analyzes the combination of blockchain and SDN for the effective operation of the VANET systems in 5G and fog computing paradigms. With managerial responsibilities shared between the blockchain and the SDN, it helps to relieve the pressure off the controller due to the ubiquitous processing that occurs. A trust-based model that curbs malicious activities in the network is also presented. The simulation results substantially guarantee an efficient network performance, while also ensuring that there is trust among the entities.

Vincenzo De Maio, Rafael Brundo Uriarte, Ivona Brandić

In Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET) users do not necessarily trust each other and in some cases they may introduce dubios information in the network. Centralized approaches to improve the credibility of information do not easily scale, require trusting the service provider and have higher network delay. Blockchain solutions are promising in the area but they need consensus on the credibility of new information, which requires the participants solve computational puzzles in a competitive manner. To cope with vehicles' limited computational resources and mobility, we propose brokerage mechanism to decide whether to execute the validation locally, or to offload it to an edge or cloud infrastructure. We define a Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT) method to enable participants to decide whether to take part in the validation and whether to offload it considering the state of the infrastructure, energy efficiency, the offloading cost and the computation reward. Our method obtains 77.7% higher profit and consumes 39.2% less energy in comparison with the case where no offloading is allowed.

Zhaowei Ma, Li Zhu, F. Richard Yu

Recent advances of routing algorithms have greatly improved the reliability and efficiency of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). But the constraints of network resources result in a trade-off between reliable data transmission and the performance of routing protocols. Rather than relaying data via intensive routing procedures, the distributed technology can spread data source over multiple cooperative components to facilitate the data access. Particularly, decentralized ledger technology (DLT), which is in essence a distributed technology, incorporates all the participants to maintain and synchronize the full copy of data. Coupled with the consensus mechanism, it guarantees the preservation of trustworthy data. These two key features of DLT contribute a more reliable data delivery. However, in VANETs, due to the locomotion of vehicles, the participants of DLT frequently adjust their physical connection, and thus interrupt their data transmission. In this paper, we propose a novel framework, where the VANET is built upon the virtualization of DLT (vDLT), to achieve seamless and reliable data transmission. In the proposed framework, components in VANETs are equipped to run vDLT nodes, which disseminate data in the virtualization layer; thus, the variation of physical layout is transparent to the data transmission via vDLT. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Chen Chen, Cong Wang, Tie Qiu, Ning Lv · 5 authors

Vehicular named data networking (VNDN) has recently emerged as a novel paradigm to facilitate content-centric data sharing for Internet of Vehicles. However, an information holder can spread fake data to clients for malicious purposes, which may affect the driving decision of the recipient, or even worse, cause traffic congestion and accidents. In this article, we build a data-sharing system that consists of a double-layer blockchain. The nodes at the bottom layer request for service by announcing their requirements in the NDN paradigm. For the upper layer, the nodes submit their demands and supplies to the nearest roadside unit for further matching. We model the balance between the demand and supply as a matching game. To encourage nodes to provide positive services, a reputation management mechanism that combines negative and positive transaction records is proposed. Simulation results verify the validity of our system, and the data-sharing mechanism fosters a secure information interaction in the VNDN.

Adnan Shahid Khan, Kuhanraj Balan, Yasir Javed, Seleviawati Tarmizi · 5 authors

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are also known as intelligent transportation systems. VANET ensures timely and accurate communications between vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) to improve road safety and enhance the efficiency of traffic flow. Due to its open wireless boundary and high mobility, VANET is vulnerable to malicious nodes that could gain access into the network and carry out serious medium access control (MAC) layer threats, such as denial of service (DoS) attacks, data modification attacks, impersonation attacks, Sybil attacks, and replay attacks. This could affect the network security and privacy, causing harm to the information exchange within the network by genuine nodes and increase fatal impacts on the road. Therefore, a novel secure trust-based architecture that utilizes blockchain technology has been proposed to increase security and privacy to mitigate the aforementioned MAC layer attacks. A series of experiment has been conducted using the Veins simulation tool to assess the performance of the proposed solution in the terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, packet loss, transmission overhead, and computational cost.

Yongxin Liu, Jian Wang, Houbing Song, Jianqiang Li · 5 authors

Mesh networks are widely used to provide flexible communication support for spatially distributed devices in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), such as UAS (Unmanned Aerial Systems) swarms. In the mesh network for UAS, a critical factor causing security concern is its routing strategy, especially for enabling source routing without disclosing the mesh network's sensitive topology among participants. Besides, conventional UAS networks are vulnerable to malicious participants which broadcast erroneous routing information. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach to enable UAS in mesh networks to collect, aggregate and redistribute routing information with a secure and trustworthy manner. Our method can avoid the disclosure of sensitive network topology in the presence of compromised peers. Evaluations show that our approach outperforms the conventional method in terms of information security.

David Gabay

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 of 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 thesis, 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.

Omaji Samuel, Nadeem Javaid, Faisal Shehzad, Muhammad Sohaib Iftikhar · 7 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Tehreem Ashfaq, Muhammad Ahmed Younis, Shahzad Rizwan, Zahid Iqbal · 6 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Qi Feng, Debiao He, Sherali Zeadally, Kaitai Liang

If all vehicles are connected together through a wireless communication channel, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can support a wide range of real-time traffic information services, such as intelligent routing, weather monitoring, emergency call, etc. However, the accuracy and credibility of the transmitted messages among the VANETs are of paramount importance as life may depend on it. In this article we introduce a novel framework called blockchain-assisted privacy-preserving authentication system (BPAS) that provides authentication automatically in VANETs and preserves vehicle privacy at the same time. This design is highly efficient and scalable. It does not require any online registration centre (except for system initialization and vehicle registration), and allows conditional tracing and dynamic revocation of misbehaving vehicles. In this article, we conduct an in-depth security analysis and a comprehensive performance evaluation (which is based on the Hyperledger Fabric platform) for our proposed framework. The results demonstrate that our framework is an efficient solution for the development of a decentralized authentication system in VANETs.

Mirko Zichichi, Stefano Ferretti, Gabriele D'Angelo

This paper presents a system architecture to promote the development of smart transportation systems. Thanks to the use of distributed ledgers and related technologies, it is possible to create, store and share data generated by users through their sensors, while moving. In particular, IOTA and IPFS are used to store and certify data (and their related metadata) coming from sensors or by the users themselves. Ethereum is exploited as the smart contract platform that coordinates the data sharing and provisioning. The necessary privacy guarantees are provided by the usage of Zero Knowledge Proof. We show some results obtained from some use case scenarios that demonstrate how such technologies can be integrated to build novel smart services and to promote social good in user mobility.

Pengfei Zhang, Hong Liu, Yan Zhang

With the development of intelligent transportation, vehicular edge computing (VEC) has enhanced the automaticity, efficiency, and coordination of the traffic system. Due to communication channel openness and traffic entity unreliability, identity authentication for privacy preservation, and trust management based on VEC become increasingly important in vehicular networks. However, existing authentication schemes mainly focus on the communication between an edge node and multiple vehicles, which may depend on the single edge computing node excessively and render it vulnerable. In this paper, we designed a blockchain-enabled authentication scheme for vehicles with decentralized identification based on traceable driving route data and the dynamic proxy mechanism. In the dynamic proxy edge computing (DPEC) mode, cooperative authentication based on secret sharing along with data tracking and trust management based blockchain is designed to enhance privacy preservation. Typical attacks are considered in this scheme to perform security analysis, and our proposed scheme is able to achieve cooperative privacy preservation for vehicles in VEC with low communication overhead and computation cost.

Xuefei Zhang, Junjie Liu, Yijing Li, Qimei Cui · 6 authors

Delivery service via ridesharing is a promising service to share travel costs and improve vehicle occupancy. Existing ridesharing systems require participating vehicles to periodically report individual private information (e.g., identity and location) to a central controller, which is a potential central point of failure, resulting in possible data leakage or tampering in case of controller break down or under attack. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain secured ridesharing delivery system, where the immutability and distributed architecture of the Blockchain can effectively prevent data tampering. However, such tamper-resistance property comes at the cost of a long confirmation delay caused by the consensus process. A Hash-oriented Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) based consensus algorithm is proposed to improve the Blockchain efficiency and reduce the transaction confirmation delay from 10 minutes to 15 seconds. The Hash-oriented PBFT effectively avoids the double-spending attack and Sybil attack. Security analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed Blockchain secured ridesharing delivery system offers strong security guarantees and satisfies the quality of delivery service in terms of confirmation delay and transaction throughput.