The security issue is one of the greatest challenges in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) attracting a great deal of attention. Malicious onboard units (OBUs) can attack other OBUs with various manners to obtain illegal gains, such as jamming, eavesdropping spoofing and so on. To reduce the potential attackers in the network, we propose an indirect reciprocity security framework with a scalar reputation assigned to each OBU to evaluate their dangerous level to the VANET. A blockchain technique that uses consensus mechanism and encryption algorithms to protect information from being tampered is applied for the transmitter to record the behaviors of other OBUs. We also propose a reinforcement learning based action selection strategy for an OBU in the VANET to choose a reliable relay OBU or determine whether to follow the request of a source OBU or not. A hotbooting technique is applied for the OBUs with prior knowledge to accelerate the learning speed. Simulation results show that the proposed action selection strategy can efficiently increase the packet delivery ratio, the reputation and the utility of the each OBU.
Recent proliferation in disruptive technologies has opened up a new horizon for Internet of Vehicles (IoV). The success of IoV highly depends on the robustness of vehicular information system as a dispute among the service providers on data rights or any kind of security violation could disrupt the transport services altogether. In this work we propose a blockchain based novel architecture for vehicle authentication and privacy preservation with seamless access control for IoV. Proposed architecture is decentralized, robust and scalable. Along with privacy preserving authentication and conflict-free access-log maintenance, the proposed BlockAPP protocol also supports an optional traceability feature. Performance evaluation using smart contact over Ethereum Blockchain validates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
The blockchain is a safe, reliable and innovative mechanism for managing numerous vehicles seeking connectivity. However, following the principles of the blockchain, the number of transactions required to update ledgers pose serious issues for vehicles as these may consume the maximum available energy. To resolve this, an efficient model is presented in this letter which is capable of handling the energy demands of the blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles (IoV) by optimally controlling the number of transactions through distributed clustering. Numerical results suggest that the proposed approach is 40.16% better in terms of energy conservation and 82.06% better in terms of the number of transactions required to share the entire blockchain-data compared with the traditional blockchain.
Recently, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have gained extensive attention from both academia and industry. AVs are a complex system composed of many subsystems, making them a typical target for attackers. Therefore, the firmware of the different subsystems needs to be updated to the latest version by the manufacturer to fix bugs and introduce new features, e.g., using security patches. In this paper, we propose a distributed firmware update scheme for the AVs' subsystems, leveraging blockchain and smart contract technology. A consortium blockchain made of different AVs manufacturers is used to ensure the authenticity and integrity of firmware updates. Instead of depending on centralized third parties to distribute the new updates, we enable AVs, namely distributors, to participate in the distribution process and we take advantage of their mobility to guarantee high availability and fast delivery of the updates. To incentivize AVs to distribute the updates, a reward system is established that maintains a credit reputation for each distributor account in the blockchain. A zero-knowledge proof protocol is used to exchange the update in return for a proof of distribution in a trust-less environment. Moreover, we use attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to ensure that only authorized AVs will be able to download and use a new update. Our analysis indicates that the additional cryptography primitives and exchanged transactions do not affect the operation of the AVs network. Also, our security analysis demonstrates that our scheme is efficient and secure against different attacks.
Regio A. Michelin, Ali Dorri, Marco Steger, Roben Castagna Lunardi · 7 authors
There is increased interest in smart vehicles acting as both data consumers and producers in smart cities. Vehicles can use smart city data for decision-making, such as dynamic routing based on traffic conditions. Moreover, the multitude of embedded sensors in vehicles can collectively produce a rich data set of the urban landscape that can be used to provide a range of services. Key to the success of this vision is a scalable and private architecture for trusted data sharing. This paper proposes a framework called SpeedyChain, that leverages blockchain technology to allow smart vehicles to share their data while maintaining privacy, integrity, resilience, and non-repudiation in a decentralized and tamper-resistant manner. Differently from traditional blockchain usage (e.g., Bitcoin and Ethereum), the proposed framework uses a blockchain design that decouples the data stored in the transactions from the block header, thus allowing fast addition of data to the blocks. Furthermore, an expiration time for each block is proposed to avoid large sized blocks. This paper also presents an evaluation of the proposed framework in a network emulator to demonstrate its benefits.
The drastically increasing volume and the growing trend on the types of data have brought in the possibility of realizing advanced applications such as enhanced driving safety, and have enriched existing vehicular services through data sharing among vehicles and data analysis. Due to limited resources with vehicles, vehicular edge computing and networks (VECONs) i.e., the integration of mobile edge computing and vehicular networks, can provide powerful computing and massive storage resources. However, road side units that primarily presume the role of vehicular edge computing servers cannot be fully trusted, which may lead to serious security and privacy challenges for such integrated platforms despite their promising potential and benefits. We exploit consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies to achieve secure data storage and sharing in vehicular edge networks. These technologies efficiently prevent data sharing without authorization. In addition, we propose a reputation-based data sharing scheme to ensure high-quality data sharing among vehicles. A three-weight subjective logic model is utilized for precisely managing reputation of the vehicles. Numerical results based on a real dataset show that our schemes achieve reasonable efficiency and high-level of security for data sharing in VECONs.
The rapid growth of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has brought huge challenges for large data storage, intelligent management, and information security for the entire system. The traditional centralized management approach for IoV faces the difficulty in dealing with real-time response. The blockchain, as an effective technology for decentralized distributed storage and security management, has already showed great advantages in its application of Bitcoin. In this paper, we investigate how the blockchain technology could be extended to the application of vehicle networking, especially with the consideration of the distributed and secure storage of big data. We define several types of nodes such as vehicle and roadside for vehicle networks and form several sub-blockchain networks. In this paper, we present a model of the outward transmission of vehicle blockchain data, and then give detail theoretical analysis and numerical results. This paper has shown the potential to guide the application of blockchain for future vehicle networking.
In this paper, we propose a new framework based on two main concepts: Software-Defined Vehicular Networks (SDVN) and Blockchain to efficiently manage and secure Vehicular Social Network (VSN). Using SDVN makes the network programmable, virtualized, and partitionable, but also it creates a well-known vulnerability named single-point of failure. Hence we propose to introduce a Blockchain paradigm that enables to certify the transactions and provide anonymity of data in distributed way using miners nodes. To this end, we introduce three levels of controllers: Principal controller (PC), Road Side Units (RSU) and miners. The PC has a global overview of the network like network topology. The RSU is an intermediate between the PC and the miners. We select local controllers acting as miners due to safety and performance. In order to select miners, we propose a Distributed Miners Connected Dominating Set algorithm (DM-CDS). The DM-CDS is a distributed algorithm with a single phase that supports dynamic topology. The selection of miners is based on a function called miner-score which depends on trust parameter particularly trust metric and network parameters such as: the connectivity degree, the average link quality indicator and the rank. The performance of the proposed DM-CDS is evaluated using many scenarios with different parameters like trust metric, node density, node mobility and radio range. The obtained results show the importance of the proposed architecture in terms of number of miners (CDS size) and robustness with different scenarios.
Enormous research efforts have been investigated in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networking to improve users safety, traffic condition, and provide different reliable services, that are challenging tasks to accomplish in the current Internet model. In-network caching is one of the promising features of Named Data Networking, a new future Internet architecture based on content name instead of the host address. It aims to enhance the network performance, data availability, distribution, and access. The applicability of NDN in VANET introduced several issues, especially in the security and trust relationships. In this paper, we present a reputation-based blockchain mechanism to secure the cache in the vehicular environment and enhance the trust between cache stores and consumer vehicles. The obtained results demonstrate that our scheme outperforms the normal NDN behavior by providing only trust content in the network.
Rakesh Shrestha, Rojeena Bajracharya, Seung Yeob Nam
With the evolution of vehicle technology, VANET plays an important role in saving life and property of the drivers by disseminating critical event information. However, the traditional VANET faces several security issues. We propose a new type of blockchain to resolve critical message dissemination issues in VANET. We create a local blockchain for real world event messages exchanged between the vehicles within the scope of the countries. In this paper, we discuss a blockchain suitable for VANET. We present a public blockchain that stores the node trustworthiness and message trustworthiness in a distributed ledger that is appropriate for secure message dissemination.
Sananda Mitra, Sumanta Bose, Sourav Sen Gupta, Anupam Chattopadhyay
The phases those turn the wheels of an autonomous vehicle, are perception, decision and actuation. Among these, the major highlight of recent research has been perception through diverse sensors, and decision through an ever-aggressive cloud/fog/mist computing setup. In this paper, we take a closer look into the flow of data, both internal and external to the autonomous vehicle. We argue that confidentiality, integrity and availability of these data are critical to the eventual adoption of higher-level security and privacy mechanisms in autonomous vehicles. To that effect, we propose a secure and tamper-resilient distributed ledger as an underlying enabler for intra-vehicular data aggregation, and study its security and privacy issues under appropriate adversarial models, where the distributed ledger is instantiated as a standard consortium blockchain.
It is believed that automated valet parking (AVP) system has great potential to mitigate the parking headache for the future smart city, as it can provide on-demand parking services, bringing immense benefits from energy saving for vehicles to time saving for drivers. For an AVP system, parking reservation is an indispensable part so that vehicles can accomplish automated parking in accordance with the reserved parking information. However, the reservation requests may not only reveal the driver identity, but also disclose his/her sensitive locations, e.g., the most visited places, which are of great concerns to users. To deal with this challenge, the anonymous techniques can be naturally applied during parking reservation, but directly applying the anonymous techniques in AVP will introduce a new security issue, i.e., the anonymous user may maliciously crash the AVP system by repetitively sending the reservation requests, which is called “double-reservation attack.” In this paper, we propose a new privacy-preserving reservation scheme for securing AVP system. Specifically, each anonymous user must have only one valid reservation token at any moment, and the token can only be used for booking one vacant parking space once. The proposed scheme does not only preserve the user's identity privacy and location privacy but also prevents the “double-reservation attack” based on several elegant building blocks, i.e., zero-knowledge proofs of knowledge and proxy resignature. Detailed security analysis confirms the security properties of our proposed scheme. In addition, extensive simulations are conducted to compare our proposed scheme with three previous schemes, and the experiment results demonstrate that our scheme is also much efficient in a WiFi-based testbed.
Smart interconnected vehicles generate a huge amount of data to be used by a wide range of applications. Although cloud based data management is currently in practice, for many applications serving road safety or traffic regulation, it is utmost important that applications access these data at the site itself for improved quality of service. Road side units (RSUs) play a crucial role in handling these vast amount of vehicular data and serving the running applications in turn. In this current era of edge computing, in-place data access is also proven to be advantageous from cost point of view. As multiple applications from different service providers are interested to access different fragments of these data, a robust access control mechanism is needed to ensure desired level of security as well as reliability for these data. In this paper, we introduce B2VDM, a novel architecture for vehicular data management at RSUs, that provides a seamless access control using Blockchain technology. The proposed B2VDM framework also implements a simple load distribution module, which maintains the reliability by minimizing the number of packet drops at a heavily loaded RSU during peak hours. An extensive evaluation using Etherium Blockchain validates the effectiveness of the proposed architecture.
VANET (Vehicle Ad-hoc Network, i.e., V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communication) with short communication latency and not needing an infrastructure could play important roles in future road safety, to implement crash warning applications. VANET could be useful for awareness of vehicles in drivers' blind spots in situations that cannot be detected by cameras or radars. However, VANET has additional security difficulties to detect and exclude vehicles that are malicious nodes from the network, besides wireless communication's inherent security vulnerabilities, such as jamming, eavesdropping, and tampering, because nodes are communicating with each other directly and not through a base station or a server. On the other hand, DLT (Distributed Ledger Technologies) typified by blockchain is planned to take important roles even in the auto industry, for example, to record/control the information of a huge number of components or maintenance/inspection histories. However, these technologies still have technical limitations to cover time sensitive safety-related applications provided by VANET. Hence, this report first introduces VANET and its security risks, then addresses blockchain's opportunities in the automotive industry. Finally, this report concludes by discussing technical challenges on blockchain to be applied for VANET, for example, the consensus process to create a new block and 51% issue.
Carpooling enables passengers to share a vehicle to reduce traveling time, vehicle carbon emissions, and traffic congestion. However, the majority of passengers lean to find local drivers, but querying a remote cloud server leads to an unnecessary communication overhead and an increased response delay. Recently, fog computing is introduced to provide local data processing with low latency, but it also raises new security and privacy concerns because users' private information (e.g., identity and location) could be disclosed when these information are shared during carpooling. While they can be encrypted before transmission, it makes user matching a challenging task and malicious users can upload false locations. Moreover, carpooling records should be kept in a distributed manner to guarantee reliable data auditability. To address these problems, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving carpooling scheme using blockchain-assisted vehicular fog computing to support conditional privacy, one-to-many matching, destination matching, and data auditability. Specifically, we authenticate users in a conditionally anonymous way. Also, we adopt private proximity test to achieve one-to-many proximity matching and extend it to efficiently establish a secret communication key between a passenger and a driver. We store all location grids into a tree and achieve get-off location matching using a range query technique. A private blockchain is built to store carpooling records. Finally, we analyze the security and privacy properties of the proposed scheme, and evaluate its performance in terms of computational costs and communication overhead.
Paulo Bartolomeu, Emanuel Vieira, Joaquim Ferreira
The emergence of distributed ledger technologies in the vehicular applications' arena is decisively contributing to their improvement and shaping of the public opinion about their future. The Tangle is a technology at its infancy, but showing enormous potential to become a key solution by addressing several of the blockchain's limitations. This paper focuses on the use of the Tangle to improve the security of both in-vehicle and off-vehicle functions in vehicular applications. To this end, key operational performance parameters are identified, evaluated and discussed with emphasis on their limitations and potential impact in future vehicular applications.
This paper discusses the application of the blockchain technology to wireless communications, in particular, for enhancing the security of vehicular communications. The idea that the blockchain will become a key solution for ensuring security and data consistency has long been controversial, even in more traditional areas such as finance or real-estate, for example. In this paper, an analysis of the two opposing sides is put forward and a review of the key aspects that need further evolution to ensure the blockchain's survival is presented. In the context of vehicular communications existing blockchain applications are examined with focus on certificate and reputation management, and message forwarding promotion. In this scope, the future of the blockchain is debated with emphasis on the key limitations of public implementations.
Current digital certification revocation systems are insufficient in the application scenario of multiple certification authorities (CAs), and it leads to a lack of mutual trust, access stability, and timeliness of data synchronization between CAs. We propose a decentralized digital certificate revocation system based on consortium blockchain technology with a secret sharing scheme. It can invalidate the digital certificate in special cases to protect the user's information and property security. Based on the characteristics of the decentralized consensus mechanism, consortium blockchain technology is the core technology of the system. The scheme achieves collaborative management of digital certificate revocation lists (CRLs) by multiple CAs, and introduces secret sharing scheme, further safeguarding the reliability of the maintenance process, and then the online certificate status protocol (OCSP) can be developed based on this system. This system is security, effective, and cannot be tampered. Compared with the traditional revocation scheme, it achieves trusted and reliable CRL system above multiple CAs, which can provide new ideas for the way of digital certificate revocation and expand the application range of blockchain technology.
Andrea Tesei, Luca Di Mauro, M. Falcitelli, Sandro Noto · 5 authors
Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) show many potential benefits to the way we travel today. The security requirements to be matched in this kind of systems are challenging and they show technical, societal, legal, and economical concerns (e.g. anonymity, accountability, non-repudiation). To address security, standardization bodies (IEEE 1609.2, ETSI) and harmonization efforts (Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC)) have proposed a Certification Authority-based (CA-based) Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (VPKI) which still suffers of Single Point of Failure (SPoF) locate in CAs and does not provide transparency in the certificate issuance. We propose IOTA-VPKI, a Distributed Ledger Technology-based (DLT-based) VPKI that improve the state-of-the-art eliminating SPoF with seamless scalability with respect to the users. IOTA-VPKI also guarantees transparency in the issuance of certificates as well as historical proof-of-possession by storing signed and hashed certificates on the IOTA ledger to facilitate verification procedure. The use of IOTA DLT assure also the feasible deploy in Internet of Things (IoT) domain, where the devices involved have limited computational resources. The effectiveness of our DLT-based VPKI will be measured in testbed for EU Horizon 2020-funded AUTOmated driving Progressed by Internet Of Things (AUTOPILOT) project.
With the development of computer and network technology, on-board computers have more stronger capability of computing and network communication. Multiple vehicles can form an Autonomous Vehicular Cloud (AVC) for the certain need to provide cloud computing services for customers. However, the infrastructure of AVC is open completely, how to guarantee the non-repudiation of task execution information is a very important issue during the process of task execution. Blockchain technology is a proven technology with information security and non-repudiation in distributed environments. Smart contract of Ethereum used to design a kind of task scheduling strategy which is suitable for the AVC environment in this paper. The strategy can guarantee the non-repudiation of task execution information. This paper builds the private chain of Ethereum on simulation vehicles node and creates and deploys the smart contract. Experiments show that the task scheduling strategy is very effective.
The development of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) has brought many conveniences to human beings, but also brings a very prominent security problem. The traditional solution to the security problem is based on centralized approach which requires a trusted central entity which exists a single point of failure problem. Moreover, there is no approach of technical level to ensure security of data. Therefore, this paper proposes a security architecture of VANET based on blockchain and mobile edge computing. The architecture includes three layers, namely perception layer, edge computing layer and service layer. The perception layer ensures the security of VANET data in the transmission process through the blockchain technology. The edge computing layer provides computing resources and edge cloud services to the perception layer. The service layer uses the combination of traditional cloud storage and blockchain to ensure the security of data.