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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
With the increasing number of vehicles on the road, the insurance market for vehicular insurance is also increasing. There has been a massive proliferation in the number of policy taken by the drivers over the year. The traditional vehicular insurance processes used by the insurance companies rely on analyzing the history of the behaviors of the drivers for deciding the suitable premium amount to be paid by the vehicles. Usage-Based Insurance (UBI), which is based on telematics, turns out to be a modern and effective approach for providing insurance to the vehicles. Unlike the traditional approach, the premiums in the UBI are calculated based on the current behavior of the drivers. Moreover, there exists a lack of transparency in the processing of the claims, which not only results in delays of receiving the claims but also leads to a number of frauds. Decentralized technology such as blockchain turns out to be an effective solution for the problems mentioned above. In this work, we propose a blockchain-based framework for vehicular UBI and incentives in ITS. We demonstrate and analyze the feasibility of our work with proper experimental testbed setup.
Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming a reality in today's world. These networks are composed of highly dynamic and capable vehicles and they rely on information that originates and is exchanged between each other. One of the main success factors of this communication is the validity of the data communicated. Hence, malicious vehicles pose a serious threat to VANETs. Once a vehicle is identified as malicious, the main challenge is to keep a centralized ledger of the malicious vehicles within the network. In this paper, an innovative distributed framework is proposed for the identification and the tagging of malicious vehicles. This framework is based on Arabic license plate recognition using different image recognition algorithms and the identification of the vehicle as malicious or non-malicious propagate through the network, with higher accuracy in comparison to the other common plate recognition approaches. The details of both the vehicle communication framework and the image processing process are presented and the framework is validated through different implementations and discussion.
Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become an essential part in smart transportation systems of modern cities. However, because of dynamicity and infrastructure-less of VANETs, the ever increasing number of network security issues become obstacles for the realization of smart cities. Software-defined VANETs have provided a reliable way to manage VANETs dynamically and securely. However, the traditionally centralized control plane makes it vulnerable to malicious nodes and results in performance degradation. Therefore, a distributed control plane is necessary. How to reach a consensus among multiple controllers under complex vehicular environment is an essential problem. In this paper, we propose a novel blockchain-based distributed software-defined VANET framework (block-SDV) to establish a secure architecture to overcome the above issues. The trust features of blockchain nodes, the number of consensus nodes, trust features of each vehicle, and the computational capability of the blockchain are considered in a joint optimization problem, which is modeled as a Markov decision process with state space, action space and reward function. Since it is difficult to be solved by traditional methods, we propose a novel dueling deep Q-learning (DDQL) with prioritized experience replay approach. Simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed block-SDV framework.
With the rapid advancement in internet connectivity, Connected Vehicle network is becoming a promising technology in the current years. However, the increased connectivity most often results in intensifying risk of cyber security threats. In this regard, the network of connected vehicle is also vulnerable to various cyber-attacks. This paper discussed the security issues with connected Priority Vehicle. A priority vehicle must ensure the high level of security otherwise, the results would be devastating and the consequences might be very serious. To ensure the safe and secure movement of connected priority vehicle on the road using blockchain technology. In our proposed system, the priority vehicle movement is controlled by blockchain network, and it only accept messages and signals from blockchain authorized nodes. In particular, the priority vehicle's location, speed and travel time are the important parameters that we secure using blockchain network. This paper also discusses the possible attacks on the priority vehicles and show how our solution can mitigate these attacks. Here it justifies the effectiveness and performance of our security solution using simulation and proves that the blockchain technology shows the potential application towards securing the information in the connected vehicle network.
Ming Li, Jian Weng, Anjia Yang, Jia-Nan Liu · 5 authors
Commercial advertisement (ad) dissemination has been proliferating on connected vehicles, allowing users to promote their products via vehicle-to-vehicle/-infrastructure communications. Despite the prospect of ad dissemination in vehicular networks, it faces challenges upon deployment especially on security and privacy. Particularly, vehicles may collude to defraud the advertiser to obtain rewards without disseminating ads, which may cause unfair “free-riding” issue in these activities. Furthermore, concerns on possible privacy leakage may discourage vehicles to participate in the process of ad dissemination. In addition, external DDoS attacks and internal single point of failure may also affect service availability. To address these issues, we explore the potential of blockchain technology to construct a fair and anonymous scheme for advertising in vehicular networks. We first present the overview of the blockchain-based ad dissemination framework. Then, under the framework, we design a concrete, fair and anonymous scheme. To ensure fairness, we utilize the Merkle hash tree together with smart contracts to achieve the “proof-of-ad-receiving” property (i.e., check whether a vehicle indeed receives an ad without deception or introducing significant storage cost) to mitigate the “free-riding” attack. On the other hand, any ad receiver who acquires a dissemination reward per ad more than once can be effectively detected and will be punished which is achieved by using smart contracts. Additionally, the proposed scheme can protect vehicles' privacy in terms of anonymity and conditional linkability based on zero-knowledge proof techniques. Lastly, extensive security analysis and implementations demonstrate the feasibility and efficiency of the scheme.
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Yue Zhang, Jian Weng, Jiasi Weng, Ming Li · 5 authors
With the popularity of Blockchain comes grave security-related concerns. Achieving privacy and traceability simultaneously remains an open question. Efforts have been made to address the issues, while they may subject to specific scenarios. This paper studies how to provide a more general solution for this open question. Concretely, we propose Onionchain, featuring a suite of protocols, offering both traceability and privacy. As the term implies, our Onionchain is inspired by Onion routing. We investigate the principles of Onion routing carefully and integrate its mechanism together with Blockchain technology. We advocate the Blockchain community to adopt Onionchain with the regards of privacy and traceability. To this end, a case-study of Onionchain, which runs in the context of Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), is proposed, providing the community a guideline to follow. Systematic security analysis and extensive experiments are also conducted to validate our secure and cost-effective Onionchain.
The security aspect of the IoT occupies a place of great importance especially after the evolution that has known this field lastly because it must take into account the transformations and the new applications .Blockchain is a new technology dedicated to the data sharing. However, this does not work the same way in the different systems with different operating principles. This article will discuss network security using the Blockchain to facilitate the sending of messages and information, enabling the use of new processes and enabling autonomous coordination of devices. To do this, we will discuss proposed solutions to ensure a high level of security in these networks in the work of other researchers. Finally, our article will propose a method of security more adapted to our needs as a team working in the ad hoc networks, this method is based on the principle of the Blockchain and that we named ”MPR Blockchain”.
In the context of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), smart vehicles have become increasingly complex. Electronic Control Units (ECU) within smart vehicles are now capable of performing intricate operations which ensures reliable functioning of the smart vehicle even in emergency situations. However, these ECU(s) lack a trusted execution/storage environment (TEE/TSE). This makes it vulnerable to many security issues. In this paper, we propose a Blockchain and Secure Element(SE) based framework for smart vehicles called SaFe in which ECU(s) use SE for TEE and TSE. We justify the use of blockchain by showing how it securely facilitates application management on SE when ECU needs are changed. Leveraging on SaFe, we introduce the concept of non-repudiable responsibility. We present our realized framework and testbed based on NXP IMX6Q, Multos M5-P19, MultiChain. Finally, we show through our experimental results that how SaFe improves the performance of safety-critical operations within ECU by as much as 85%, all this while guaranteeing increased security, tamperproofness, immutability and reduced memory, storage, processing overhead.
Sachin Sharma, Kamal Kumar Ghanshala, Seshadri Mohan
With the transformation of connected vehicles into the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the time is now ripe for paving the way for the next generation of connected vehicles with novel applications and innovative security measures. The connected vehicles are experiencing prenominal growth in the auto industry, but are still studded with many security and privacy vulnerabilities. Today's IoV applications are part of cyber physical communication systems that collect useful information from thousands of smart sensors associated with the connected vehicles. The technology advancement has paved the way for connected vehicles to share significant information among drivers, auto manufacturers, auto insurance companies and operational and maintenance service providers for various applications. The critical issues in engineering the IoV applications are effective to use of the available spectrum and effective allocation of good channels an opportunistic manner to establish connectivity among vehicles, and the effective utilization of the infrastructure under various traffic conditions. Security and privacy in information sharing are the main concerns in a connected vehicle communication network. Blockchain technology facilitates secured communication among users in a connected vehicles network. Originally, blockchain technology was developed and employed with the cryptocurrency. Bitcoin, to provide increased trust, reliability, and security among users based on peer-to-peer networks for transaction sharing. In this paper, we propose to integrate blockchain technology into ad hoc vehicular networking so that the vehicles can share network resources with increased trust, reliability, and security using distributed access control system and can benefit a wider scope of scalable IoV applications scenarios for decision making. The proposed architecture is the faithful environment for information sharing among connected vehicles. Blockchain technology allows multiple copies of data storage at the distribution cloud. Distributed access control system is significantly more secure than a traditional centralized system. This paper also describes how important of ad hoc vehicular networking in human life, possibilities in real-world implementation and its future trends. The ad hoc vehicular networking may become one of the most trendy networking concepts in the future that has the perspective to bring out much ease human beneficial and secured applications.