Yingying Yao, Xiaolin Chang, Jelena Mišić, Vojislav B. Mišić · 5 authors
As modern vehicles and distributed fog services advance apace, vehicular fog services (VFSs) are being expected to span across multiple geo-distributed datacenters, which inevitably leads to cross-datacenter authentication. Traditional cross-datacenter authentication models are not suitable for the scenario of high-speed moving vehicles accessing VFS, because these models either ignored user privacy or ignored the delay requirement of driving vehicles. This paper proposes a blockchain-assisted lightweight anonymous authentication (BLA) mechanism for distributed VFS, which is provisioned to driving vehicles. BLA can achieve the following advantages: 1) realizing a flexible cross-datacenter authentication, in which a vehicle can decide whether to be reauthenticated or not when it enters a new vehicular fog datacenter; 2) achieving anonymity, and granting vehicle users the responsibility of preserving their privacy; 3) it is lightweight by achieving noninteractivity between vehicles and service managers (SMs), and eliminating the communication between SMs in the authentication process, which significantly reduces the communication delay; and 4) resisting the attack that the database governed by one center is tampered with. BLA achieves these advantages by effectively combining modern cryptographical technology and blockchain technology. These security features are demonstrated by carrying out security analysis. Meanwhile, extensive simulations are conducted to validate the efficiency and practicality of BLA.
Farah Kandah, Brennan Huber, Anthony Skjellum, Amani Altarawneh
Advancement in communication technologies and the Internet of Things (IoT) is driving smart cities adoption that aims to increase operational efficiency and improve the quality of services and citizen welfare. It is estimated that by 2020, 75% of cars shipped globally will be equipped with hardware to facilitate vehicle connectivity. The privacy, reliability and integrity of communication must be ensured so that actions can be accurate and implemented promptly after receiving actionable information. Because vehicles are equipped with the ability to compute, communicate, and sense their environment, there is a concomitant critical need to create and maintain trust among network entities in the context of the network's dynamism, an issue that requires building and validating the trust between entities in a small amount of time before entities leave each other's range. In this work, we present a multi-tier scheme consisting of an authentication and trust building/distribution framework designed to ensure the safety and validity of the information exchanged in the system.
Sara Nadeem, Muhammad Rizwan, Fahad Ahmad, Jaweria Manzoor
Cognitive radio, ad hoc networks' applications are continuously increasing in wireless communication globally. In vehicles' environment, cognitive radio technology with mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) enables vehicles to monitor the available channels and to effectively function in these frequencies through sharing ongoing information with drivers and different frameworks to enhance traffic safety on roads. To fulfill the computational storage resources’ limitations of a specific vehicle, Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) is used by merging VANET with cloud computing. Cloud computing requires high security and protection because authenticate users and attackers have the same rights in VCC. The security is enhanced in CRVANETs, but the distributed nature of cloud unlocks a door for dissimilar attacks, such as trust modal, data security, connection fault and query tracking attacks. This paper proposes an effective and secured blockchain scheme-based distributed cloud architecture in place of conventional cloud architecture to secure the drivers’ privacy with low cost and on-demand sensing procedure in CRVANETs ecosystem.
Shihan Bao, Yue Cao, Ao Lei, Philip Asuquo · 7 authors
Research into the established area of the intelligent transportation system is evolving into the Internet of Vehicles, a fast-moving research area, fuelled in part by rapid changes based on cyber-physical systems. It needs to be recognized that existing vehicular communication systems are susceptible to privacy vulnerabilities which require addressing. A practical challenge is that many vehicular communication applications and services make use of basic safety messages that contain the identity of the vehicle, location, and other personal data. A popular way of dealing with this privacy issue is to utilize a pseudonym change scheme to protect the vehicle's identity and location. However, many such schemes suffer that the cost grows and the certificate management difficulty raises with the number of pseudonyms generated and stored, casting doubt of the economic feasibility of that approach. We propose a decentralized blockchain-based solution for pseudonym management that overcomes these limitations. This scheme consists of pseudonym distribution and a shuffle operation, allowing the reuse of existing pseudonyms to different vehicles. The results reported here, including those from our simulations, demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reuse existing pseudonyms and achieve a better degree of anonymity at a lower cost than existing schemes.
The development of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) has facilitated adaptive traffic signal control for intelligent transportation. In this paper, we proposed the traffic signal control mechanism based on a consortium blockchain, which has saved plenty of financial and material resources. It has solved the centralization problems and minimized the high degree of human intervention in the process of traffic signal light management. As a road is congested, the vehicle forwards road condition messages. The traffic department (TD) adjusts the signal light duration to allow the synergistic optimization management, and control the traffic vehicle status through a smart contract. In addition, we propose a credibility mechanism to effectively prevent vehicles from broadcasting mendacious messages and malicious requests, thereby enhancing the credibility of vehicles and providing a secure and trustworthy communication environment for the VANETs. It is hazardous for vehicles to send plaintext messages in an open environment because their privacy and security are threatened. Thus, we utilize ElGamal encryption and group signature algorithm to guarantee the confidentiality, privacy, and non-repudiation of any information. The safety analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the scheme is feasible and valid, and it can facilitate the adaptive control of traffic signal lights.
In vehicle-to-grid (V2G) networks, battery-powered vehicle (BV) provides service to the power grid. In order to encourage more BVs to provide the service for power grid, it is necessary to reward the BVs from the power grid. To extensively deploy V2G networks, some security and privacy problems must be solved. In this paper, for the first time, we propose the novel concept of blockchain-based anonymous rewarding scheme (BBARS) for V2G networks. The novel concept comes from the application requirement which has not been solved by now. We give the formal system model and security model of BBARS. Then, we design the concrete BBARS scheme by making use of two different public key cryptosystem. Through security analysis and performance analysis, the designed scheme is provably secure and efficient. The analysis results also show the designed BBARS scheme is practical for secure V2G networks in smart grid.
This paper attempts to solve the security problems in communication, consensus-making and authentication of nodes in the Internet of vehicles (IoV) for intelligent transport. Considering the defects of the central node and service complexity in the IoV, the blockchain was integrated with the IoV to create a decentralized mechanism for communication and consensus-making. In the architecture of the blockchain-based IoV, the Byzantine consensus algorithm based on time sequence and gossip protocol is used to complete information communication and consensus authentication, which not only ensures communication security, improves the consensus efficiency of nodes, but also improves the fault tolerance of the algorithm. The experimental results show that our algorithm outshined the traditional authentication method in information security and consensus efficiency of the IoV. The research findings provide a reference solution to the authentication problems in the IoV for intelligent transport.
Razi Iqbal, Talal Ashraf Butt, Muhammad Afzaal, Khaled Salah
The Internet of things is the next stage in the evolution of the Internet that is being materialized with the integration of billions of smart objects. The state-of-the-art communication technologies have enabled the previously isolated devices to become an active part of the Internet. This constant connectivity opens new avenues for novel applications such as the realization of social Internet of things and its subdomain the social Internet of vehicles. Socializing requires sharing of information that entails trust, especially in an open and broad social environment. This article highlights the key factors involved in conceptualizing an efficient trust model for social Internet of vehicles. Furthermore, it focuses on the unique challenges involved in designing the trust models for social Internet of vehicles. Several trust models exist in literature; however, most of the existing trust models are specific to their domains, for example, Internet of things, social Internet of things, or general vehicular networks. This article presents a brief review of the trust models that have the potential to be implemented in Social Internet of vehicles. Finally, the authors present an overview of how trending concepts and emerging technologies like blockchain and fog computing can assist in developing a trust-based social Internet of vehicles model for high-efficiency, decentralized architecture and dynamic nature of vehicular networks.
The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has integrated the sensor network silos to the Internet and enabled the provision of value-added services across these networks. These smart devices are now becoming socially conscious by following the social Internet of Things (SIoT) model that empowers them to create and maintain social relationships among them. The Social Internet of Vehicle (SIoV) is one application of SIoT in the vehicular domain that has evolved the existing intelligent transport system (ITS) and vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) to the next phase of Intelligent by adding socializing aspect and constant connectivity. SIoV generates a massive amount of real-time data enriched with context and social relationship information about vehicles, drivers, passengers, and the surrounding environment. Therefore, the role of privacy management becomes essential in SIoV, as data is collected and stored at different layers of its architecture. The challenge of privacy is aggravated because the dynamic nature of SIoV poses a major threat in its adoption. Motivated by the need to address these aspects, this paper identifies the challenges involved in managing privacy in SIoV. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the privacy issues and factors that are essential to be considered for preserving privacy in SIoV environments from different perspectives including the privacy of a person, behavior and action, communication, data and image, thoughts and feelings, location and space, and association. In addition, the paper discusses the blockchain-based solutions to preserve privacy for SIoV.
The next generation of vehicles will be autonomous, connected, electric, and intelligent with distinct requirements such as high mobility, low latency, real-time applications, seamless connectivity, and security. Blockchain can provide a good solution to the issue of secure message dissemination or secure information sharing in vehicular networks with a weak trust relationship among the nodes. In this paper, we investigate the design of a regional blockchain for VANETs, where the blockchain is shared among nodes in a geographically bounded area. We investigate how to design the regional blockchain while achieving a low 51% attack success probability. We derive a condition that guarantees a low 51% attack success probability in terms of the numbers of good nodes and malicious nodes, the message delivery time, and the puzzle computation time. The condition can provide a useful guideline for selection of several control parameters guaranteeing the stable operation of the blockchain. We run several simulations to show the validity of the condition and investigate the effects of various parameters on the 51% attack success probability. Our analysis and simulation results show that maintaining a low message delivery time for good nodes is very important in protecting the stability of the blockchain system.
This paper investigates how mobility affects the performance of a blockchain system operating in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET). The mobility of nodes incurs a unique challenge to a blockchain system due to continuous change and dynamicity in the connectivity of the nodes. Specifically, the mobility makes a proof-of-work (PoW) process difficult since while moving the nodes can only have a limited length of time for a “rendezvous” to exchange a new block for verification. For this reason, accurate modeling for the block exchange behavior in a VANET is also challenging, which nevertheless has not been discussed in previous studies. Therefore, this paper provides an analysis framework that formulates the impact of mobility on a blockchain system's performance in a VANET based on three key metrics: (i) the probability of a successful addition of block to the chain; (ii) the stability of a rendezvous, and; (iii) the number of blocks exchanged during a rendezvous. The closed-form expressions and numerical results display the performance of a blockchain system in various scenarios in a VANET.
Xiaoliang Wang, Pengjie Zeng, Nick Patterson, Frank Jiang · 5 authors
Thanks to the rapid development in mobile vehicles and wireless technologies, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has become an attractive application that can provide a large number of mobile services for drivers. Vehicles can be informed of the mobile position, direction, speed, and other real-time information of nearby vehicles to avoid traffic jams and accidents. However, the environments of IoV could be dangerous in the absence of security protections. Due to the openness and self-organization of IoV, there are enormous malicious attackers. To guarantee the safety of mobile services, we propose an effective decentralized authentication mechanism for IoV on the basis of the consensus algorithm of blockchain technology. The simulation under the veins framework is carried out to verify the feasibility of the scheme in reducing the selfish behavior and malicious attacks in IoV.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs)
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
The vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) is one of the most promising application in the communications of smart vehicles and the smart transportation systems. However, authentication and privacy of users are still two vital issues in VANETs. It is crucial to prevent internal vehicles from broadcasting the forged messages while preserving the privacy of vehicles against the tracking attack. Moreover, in the traditional mode, the transactional data storage provides no distributed and decentralized security, so that the third party initiates the dishonest behaviors possibly. In this paper, based on blockchain technique, we propose a traceable and decentralized the Internet of Vehicle system framework for communication among smart vehicles by employing of a secure access authentication scheme between vehicles and RoadSide Units (RSUs). On the one hand, this scheme allows that vehicles employ pseudonyms for Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications anonymously in the non-fully trusted environment. On the other hand, the transparency of vehicles in authentication and announcement is preformed efficiently by the blockchain technology. In addition, the transaction information is tamper-resistant that provides the distributed and decentralized property for the different cloud servers. With the help of Certificate Authority (CA) and the RoadSide Units (RSUs), our proposal achieves the conditional privacy to trace the real identity of the malicious vehicle in the anonymous announcements as well. Finally, through the theoretical analysis and simulations, our scheme is able to construct a secure and decentralized system framework of VANETs with accountability and privacy preservation.
Sharing traffic information on the vehicular network can help in the implementation of intelligent traffic management, such as car accident warnings, road construction notices, and driver route changes to reduce traffic congestion earlier. In the future, in the case of autonomous driving, traffic information will be exchanged more frequently and more immediately. Once the exposed traffic incident is incorrect, the driving route will be misleading, and the driving response may be in danger. The blockchain ensures the correctness of data and tampers resistance in the consensus mechanism, which can solve such similar problems. This paper proposes a proof-of-event consensus concept applicable to vehicular networks rather than proof-of-work or proof-of-authority approaches. The traffic data are collected through the roadside units, and the passing vehicles will verify the correctness when receiving the event notification. In addition, a two-phase transaction on blockchain is introduced to send warning messages in appropriate regions and time periods. The simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively feedback the correctness of traffic events and provide traceable events with trust verification.
The modern intelligent transportation system brings not only new opportunities for vehicular Internet of Things (IoT) services but also new challenges for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). Apart from enhanced network performance, a practical and reliable security scheme is needed to handle the trust management while preserving user privacy at the same time. The emerging 5G mobile communication system is viewed as a prominent technology for ultra-reliable, low-latency wireless communication services. Furthermore, incorporating software-defined network (SDN) architecture into the 5G-VANET enables global information gathering and network control. Hence, real-time IoT services on transportation monitoring and reporting can be well supported. Both pave the way for an innovative vehicular security scheme. This paper investigates the security and privacy issue in the transportation system and the vehicular IoT environment in SDN-enabled 5G-VANET. Due to the decentralized and immutable characteristics of blockchain, a blockchain-based security framework is designed to support the vehicular IoT services, i.e., real-time cloud-based video report and trust management on vehicular messages. This paper explicitly illustrates the SDN-enabled 5G-VANET model and the scheduling procedures of the blockchain-based framework. The numerical simulation results also show that malicious vehicular nodes or messages can be well detected while the overhead and impact on the network performance are acceptable for large-scale scenarios. Through case studies and theoretical analysis, we demonstrate our design substantially guarantees a secure and trustworthy vehicular IoT environment with user privacy preserved.
A vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) can improve the flow of traffic to facilitate intelligent transportation and to provide convenient information services, where the goal is to provide self-organizing data transmission capabilities for vehicles on the road to enable applications, such as assisted vehicle driving and safety warnings. VANETs are affected by issues such as identity validity and message reliability when vehicle nodes share data with other nodes. The method used to allow the vehicle nodes to upload sensor data to a trusted center for storage is susceptible to security risks, such as malicious tampering and data leakage. To address these security challenges, we propose a data security sharing and storage system based on the consortium blockchain (DSSCB). This digital signature technique based on the nature of bilinear pairing for elliptic curves is used to ensure the reliability and integrity when transmitting data to a node. The emerging consortium blockchain technology provides a decentralized, secure, and reliable database, which is maintained by the entire network node. In DSSCB, smart contracts are used to limit the triggering conditions for preselected nodes when transmitting and storing data and for allocating data coins to vehicles that participate in the contribution of data. The security analysis and performance evaluations demonstrated that our DSSCB solution is more secure and reliable in terms of data sharing and storage. Compared with the traditional blockchain system, the time required to confirm the data block was reduced by nearly six times and the transmission efficiency was improved by 83.33%.
Md. Adib Muhtasim, Syeda Ramisa Fariha, Rayhan Rashid, Nabila Islam · 5 authors
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network formed by electronic objects having embedded sensors, software and network connectivity in them. Although they can collect and exchange data, they are prone to both cyber-attack and physical tampering. Thus, it is essential to encrypt their communications, by addressing new challenges such as impersonating "things" or nodes, denial-of-sleep attacks that drain batteries, to denial-of-service attacks (DoS). A peer-to-peer model can eliminate the dependency of a centralized data center. A Blockchain is a model for a distributed database of records of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating nodes. In it, digital signatures are validated instead of physical signatures. With a decentralized approach implemented with cryptographic algorithms, blockchain oversees a secure transaction between IoT devices and coordinates them. This paper explores one of the processes of incorporating blockchain with a very vulnerable centralized IoT structure. IoT devices are represented as aircrafts in which the engine data and various data from the aircrafts' sensors are sent to the airports for analysis. After analysis, the analyzed data is sent to nearby airports and also to that particular aircraft. The paper analyzes how the blockchain network is created, the time latency of sending the data of the IoT devices through this blockchain network and some parts of the analysis process which is required for aircraft maintenance.
Alina Buzachis, Antonio Celesti, Antonino Galletta, Maria Fazio · 5 authors
Every year, traffic collisions have increased rapidly in proportion to the increase in the number of vehicles, especially at intersections. The main cause is human error in recognition and decision-making. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and Autonomous Intersection Management (AIM) systems represent emerging challenges. AVs can take a great deal of different actions when approaching an intersection. Several research centers are developing algorithms to solve one of the crucial aspects of autonomous driving, i.e the intersections management, trying to avoid collisions and traffic congestion. In this context, security is the main concern, due to the high exposure to data and information between Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Intersection (V2I) communications. Blockchain and smart contracts, one of most promising technologies emerged in recent years, represent a possible solution for the existing security issues. Smart contracts are the orchestration and choreography protocols that facilitate, verify and negotiated agreement between the consenting parties participating in the Blockchain network. In this paper, we propose a Multi-Agent AIM (MA-AIM) system based on V2I/I2V communication to securely manage vehicles crossing though an intersections by leveraging Blockchain facilities. A central Intersection Manager Agent (IMA) is implemented at each intersection while each vehicle is controlled by a Driver Agent (DA).
Blockchains are used to perform state agreement in a distributed system. However, there is no way to validate off-chain actions, such as physical actions, in the current architecture. This paper proposes a new blockchain architecture which features locally physically-verified transactions. From this new architecture, this paper presents a protocol for securing vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) without the need to constantly communicate with roadside units (RSUs) or other infrastructure components. However, issues such as privacy in VANETs and Blockchains are left to future work. This paper shows the results from simulations of the current system in order to note its weaknesses. In particular, this paper can be used as a benchmark to show that ideas such as Proof-of-Work and full blockchain validation cannot work in a purely peer-to-peer VANET.