To address low-efficiency trust management in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), this paper proposes a hybrid consensus algorithm combining Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) and Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT). By selecting dual primary nodes through DPoS voting and trust values, it enhances consensus security. The three-stage consensus protocol is optimized to a fivestage one, reducing node communication and improving efficiency. Experiments show the algorithm increases throughput by$1.46 \times$on average and reduces consensus delay by$1.54 \times$.
The security and privacy of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication are critical for the reliability of future intelligent transportation systems (ITS). Existing V2X public key infrastructure (VPKI) models face centralization risks, inefficient revocation, limited privacy, and vulnerability to quantum attacks. While blockchain-based frameworks improve decentralization, they often depend on classical cryptography and offer limited defense against Sybil attacks and identity linkage. This paper presents DIMA, a post-quantum decentralized identity management architecture for V2X authentication and privacy preservation. DIMA integrates a dual-layer permissioned blockchain with CRYSTALS-Dilithium for quantum-resistant digital signatures, zk-STARKs for anonymous pseudonym issuance, and privacy tokens with a reputation-based refresh mechanism for Sybil resistance. A hash-based accumulator supports scalable revocation, while self-sovereign identity (SSI) and zero-knowledge attribute proofs enable privacy-preserving access control. Security is analyzed under a quantum-capable adversarial model, and performance is evaluated using analytical benchmarks. Results demonstrate that DIMA achieves strong unlinkability, scalable Sybil deterrence, and real-time authentication, addressing key limitations of prior approaches and providing a quantum-resilient foundation for next-generation V2X ecosystems.
SivaKumar Depuru, Obulareddy Chandana, M. Prakash, Nimsivardhan · 5 authors
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) needs to have effective security and privacy models that can be relied upon to deliver reliable information transfer between vehicles, roadside facilities, and cloud offerings. Although the newly suggested Quantum-Inspired Metaheuristic Framework (QIMF) is a useful tool in terms of trust assessment, adaptive privacy contracts, and secure access, its centralized architecture introduces the issues of scalability, auditing, and collusion/tampering resilience. To address these drawbacks, the present research proposes a framework using BQIMF, a Blockchain-Based Quantum-Inspired Metaheuristic Framework that combines quantum-inspired optimization with distributed ledger technology in decentralized trust maintenance and privacy protection. The model presented proposes that QIMF calculates trust scores and signs privacy agreements by quantum superposition and tunneling, and smart contracts based on blockchain are used in a way that the agreements and access decisions between the IoV ecosystem are recorded permanently. This hybrid solution removes points of failure, facilitates audit trails that cannot be tampered with and allows compliance with privacy policies to be verified. The BQIMF is tested over the CICIoV2024 dataset in various vehicular communication conditions, including denial-of-service, spoofing, and man-in-the-middle attacks in order to validate performance. As demonstrated in experiments, BQIMF has 98.7% accuracy in trust evaluation, 35% lower unauthorized access rate than classical blockchain-only systems, and a low access latency (under 25 ms) despite large network load. These results indicate that blockchain and quantum-inspired optimization have the potential to deliver a scalable, decentralized, and adaptable solution to secure vehicular communication, leading to the deployment of next-generation IoV.
Electric vehicles (EVs) are increasingly central to sustainable mobility, yet their integration into smart city infrastructures remains limited by centralized data systems that restrict scalability, threaten user privacy, and heighten exposure to cyber risks. Most prior work has concentrated on technical performance, with little attention to governance requirements such as accountability, regulatory compliance, and citizen trust. To address this gap, this study develops a decentralized EV data management framework based on IOTA’s Tangle, a distributed ledger designed for secure, scalable, and fee-less interactions across vehicles, charging stations, and urban digital platforms. Using a comparative design, conventional blockchain systems are evaluated against IOTA through simulation results. Findings show that the IOTA-based model sustains faster validation, eliminates fees, and supports higher throughput, while also aligning with governance principles reflected in policies such as the GDPR. The study demonstrates how distributed ledgers can advance both technical feasibility and trust in EV ecosystems.
Urban transportation is under strain from growing congestion, environmental impact and inefficiencies in centralised ride-sharing systems. This work presents a decentralized peer - to - peer carpooling platform that can use blockchain technology and smart contracts to securely control the entire ride life cycle, without intermediaries. The system uses Ethereum smart contracts for transparent and tamper proof handling of ride request, acceptance, completion and payments thus eliminating the risks associated with the centralized controllers. A layer geospatial computation powered by OpenRouteService computes precise distances and fares, and interactive maps increase user trust in price. The prototype, implemented using Streamlit, Web3.py and Solidity, includes role-based dashboards for drivers and passengers, wallet-based authentication to prevent identity spoofing and optimized contract design to reduce gas costs. Presenting evidence of values for outputs through functional testing on a local Ethereum network, there are correct state transitions, approve stable transaction costs, stable and accurate of mappings are within +/-0.1 km of Google Maps. This platform provides a scalable and privacy respecting method for shared mobility with future expansions towards decentralised storage, advanced reputation systems and zk -proof based location privacy.
Xingxing Chen, Xiaohong Zhang, Shaojiang Zhong, Shuling Liu
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are now a pivotal component of Intelligent Transportation Systems. However, ensuring secure vehicle identity authentication and protecting user privacy remain two challenging issues in VANETs. Addressing these challenges, this paper seamlessly integrates blockchain technology with the InterPlanetary File System to realize a fully decentralized storage solution for identity verification information. Simultaneously, it employs zk-SNARK and elliptic curve cryptography to allow vehicle users to anonymously complete identity verification. Additionally, the lightweight identity authentication proof obtained after successful verification maintains credibility while reducing the computational and communication costs for both roadside units and vehicles. The security and performance analysis of the system show that the proposed scheme has significant advantages in both communication and computation compared with similar research, while also offering superior security and a broader range of functional attributes compared to existing competitive approaches.
Mahalinoro Razafimanjato, Malik Muhammad Saad, Dongkyun Kim
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), a critical component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), enhances driving safety and traffic efficiency through real-time data exchange. However, the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of IoV introduces significant security and trust challenges. To address these, trust management systems have emerged as vital mechanisms to ensure the reliability and integrity of data exchanged between vehicles. Blockchain technology offers a robust framework for addressing security and trust issues in IoV environments. The decentralized, tamper-resistant, and transparent nature of the blockchain makes it suitable for complex vehicular environments. This survey provides an overview of state-of-the-art blockchain-based trust management systems in IoV. Following a systematic literature review that filtered 8,280 publications to 63 core studies from 2019 to 2024, we present a thematic classification of existing solutions, focusing on those employing public and private blockchains. Unlike previous surveys, our work focuses specifically on the intersection of blockchain and trust management systems in IoV by analyzing approaches across four dimensions: trust computation methods, such as game theory and AI-driven models; blockchain scaling solutions, including sharding, sidechains, and optimized consensus mechanisms; integration with emerging technologies such as 5G/6G, Digital Twins, and Federated Learning; and security and privacy mechanisms. Finally, this survey identifies current challenges and provides future research directions, highlighting the need for more scalable, adaptive, secure, and privacy-preserving trust management systems in IoV.
With the advancement of edge intelligence technology and the acceleration of urbanization, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have experienced rapid development. Vehicle-road-cloud (VRC) collaboration was enabled through the coordinated sharing of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-road (V2R), and vehicle-to-cloud (V2C) data in the Internet of vehicles, thereby constructing a more efficient cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS). However, numerous security threats in VRC collaboration were found to severely impede the development of cooperative autonomous driving. The development status of VRC collaboration was first summarized, and the history of autonomous driving and the VRC-based autonomous driving environment were elaborated. Subsequently, attacks and security defense technologies in VRC collaboration were systematically categorized into two types: classical information security mechanisms and defense technologies, which were detailed from five aspects—information availability, integrity, confidentiality, authenticity, and non-repudiation; and machine learning-based security threats and defense technologies, which were analyzed from both centralized and distributed perspectives. Finally, future development directions and research priorities of VRC collaborative security technologies were forecasted, primarily covering federated learning, blockchain technology, secure multi-party computation, zero-knowledge proof, and differential privacy technology.
With the rapid advancement of Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication systems, ensuring robust security has become a critical challenge. Various studies have proposed several protocols; however, many of them may suffer from potential threats, such as impersonation attacks. This paper presents an efficient and lightweight authentication protocol for V2X communication. Our scheme uses zero-knowledge proof to perform mutual authentication without revealing the real identities in V2X communication. The proposed protocol ensures that all vehicles on the network are authenticated without compromising the integrity. Hence, the proposed scheme protects V2X communication against possible attacks. The preliminary result shows that the proposed scheme is efficient in terms of computational complexity.
Blockchain has moved from a cryptocurrency infrastructure to a coordination technology for modern communication systems. This review examines how blockchain is being embedded into next-generation communication environments, with particular attention to Internet of Things deployments, edge-cloud collaboration, cyber-physical infrastructures, security and privacy management, smart grids, vehicular networking, and emerging 5G/6G ecosystems. Following the logic of recent survey work on blockchain-enabled communications, the article synthesizes representative peer-reviewed studies, clarifies the blockchain mechanisms that matter for communication engineering, and organizes the literature around application layers rather than isolated protocols. The review shows that blockchain creates value when communication systems require shared trust, auditable automation, decentralized identity, incentive-compatible coordination, or tamper-resistant data exchange across organizational boundaries. At the same time, real deployment remains constrained by throughput, latency, storage overhead, interoperability, privacy leakage, governance complexity, and uneven energy efficiency across consensus designs. Building on both communication-network research and information-systems scholarship, the article develops an integrated analytical view of when blockchain genuinely improves communication architectures and when lighter coordination mechanisms are preferable. The paper concludes by identifying future directions around lightweight consensus, AI-native blockchain orchestration, cross-chain communication fabrics, privacy-preserving verification, and programmable trust for 6G and autonomous infrastructures.
The emergence of 6G networks enhances the speed and compatibility of Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), leveraging underutilized bands to improve wireless communication and security, though its adaptability may introduce cyber vulnerabilities; to address this, we propose an energy-efficient consortium-based blockchain-enabled heterogeneous (EBH) 6G network for IoT devices, offering secure VANET control through a lattice-based ring signcryption scheme that ensures timely message relaying while preserving vehicle anonymity and cloud data confidentiality, with blockchain blocks formed via secure peer nodes and service provider data; our protocol’s security was rigorously validated through analysis and Python-based implementation, achieving 42.1 ms computational cost and 1026-bit communication overhead, and proving effectiveness across varying block and transaction loads, while guaranteeing key security properties-anonymity, linkable privacy, unforgeability, and confidentiality-even under quantum threats, using lattice-based cryptography, Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP), and blockchain immutability.
Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) commissioned a cooperative intelligent transport system (C-ITS) pilot. Although the European C-ITS Security Credential Management System (EU CCMS) and European Telecommunications Standards Institute Public Key Infrastructure (ETSI PKI) standards offer a foundation for secure Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication, challenges persist in scalability, latency, revocation, and misbehavior detection. This work proposes a hybrid framework, with improvements including blockchain-based revocation, decentralized trust models, and privacy preservation using pseudonym rotation and zero-knowledge proofs, thus extending existing standards.
Modern vehicles accumulate fragmented lifecycle records across OEMs, owners, and service centers that are difficult to verify and prone to fraud. We propose VehiclePassport, a GAIA-X-aligned digital passport anchored on blockchain with zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) for privacy-preserving verification. VehiclePassport immutably commits to manufacturing, telemetry, and service events while enabling selective disclosure via short-lived JWTs and Groth16 proofs. Our open-source reference stack anchors hashes on Polygon zkEVM at <$0.02 per event, validates proofs in <10 ms, and scales to millions of vehicles. This architecture eliminates paper-based KYC, ensures GDPR-compliant traceability, and establishes a trustless foundation for insurance, resale, and regulatory applications in global mobility data markets.
As intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) evolve rapidly, the increasing computational demands of connected vehicles call for efficient task offloading. Centralized approaches face challenges in scalability, security, and adaptability to dynamic network conditions. To address these issues, we propose a blockchain-based decentralized task offloading framework with network-aware resource allocation and tokenized economic incentives. In our model, vehicles generate computational tasks that are dynamically mapped to available computing nodes-including vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) resources, roadside edge servers (RSUs), and cloud data centers-based on a multi-factor score considering computational power, bandwidth, latency, and probabilistic packet loss. A blockchain transaction layer ensures auditable and secure task assignment, while a proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus and smart-contract-driven dynamic pricing jointly incentivize participation and balance workloads to minimize delay. In extensive simulations reflecting realistic ITS dynamics, our approach reduces total completion time by 12.5-24.3%, achieves a task success rate of 84.2-88.5%, improves average resource utilization to 88.9-92.7%, and sustains >480 transactions per second (TPS) with a 10 s block interval, outperforming centralized/cloud-based baselines. These results indicate that integrating blockchain incentives with network-aware offloading yields secure, scalable, and efficient management of computational resources for future ITSs.
Purpose: The framework of the Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) is facilitated by modern communication systems. In Real-Time (RT), the data is communicated to one another, and it is encouraged by AV. This AV also communicates with organizations stationed along the roadway, and navigates without human intervention. The dynamic and decentralized communication between vehicles and Roadside Units (RSUs) is integrated in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Then, there is no centralized structure for utilization in VANET. This distributed system faces difficulties in 2 areas: Authentication and security. The susceptibility to the network is increased by the unpredictable and risky features of AV, because there is currently no robust authentication system in place for multi-broadcast situations. Hence, the network is susceptible to security breaches, illegal access, data tampering, and service interruptions. During Handover Authentication (HA) between RSUs, critical security vulnerabilities are introduced by AV communication in ad-hoc networks, because of their dynamic topology and mobility patterns.Methodology: To address these issues, this study proposes a HA system for ad hoc AVs that uses blockchain technology. Using distributed controllers and Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs), the proposed methodology enables rapid and safe authentication of AVs during handover between RSUs. To optimize authentication, decentralized Smart Network Controllers (SNCs) were used by the suggested method. This suggested method also eliminates the dependency on centralized entities and mitigates Single Point of Failure (SPoF) vulnerabilities.Findings: A private Blockchain network implementation makes the system transparent and immutable while providing tamper-proof storage for vehicle data. Simulation results demonstrate that the protocol achieves a 30.4% reduction in authentication latency, 27.8% lower packet loss rate, and a 23.5% improvement in throughput compared to EMT and GMT baseline protocols. Additionally, the system sustains a 95.2% success rate in mutual authentication under high vehicle density and maintains security integrity against impersonation, Sybil, and replay attacks.Originality/Value: The suggested protocol also mitigates SPoF risk of centralized systems and offers smooth Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) services without charging any transaction fee. This method provides strong and scalable security for the communication of AVs in smart city systems.
Hope Leticia Nakayiza, Love Allen Chijioke Ahakonye, Dong‐Seong Kim, Jae Min Lee
The growing deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in military operations necessitates a secure, scalable, and decentralized approach to airspace management. This paper introduces MilChain-UAV, a blockchain-based traffic control framework tailored for military UAV networks. Built on PureChain, a custom permissioned blockchain network, MilChain-UAV supports autonomous mission governance, real-time path validation, and decentralized collision avoidance. To optimize blockchain efficiency while ensuring auditability, telemetry data is stored off-chain using IPFS, with only the cryptographic hashes anchored on-chain. By replacing centralized controllers with a distributed ledger, the framework enhances resilience against jamming and spoofing while enabling dynamic routing and verifiable behavior logging. Experimentation results demonstrate MilChain- UA V's effectiveness in improving efficiency and scalability in critical military operations, providing a robust solution for autonomous and secure management of military UAV traffic.
Na Wang, Yaning Wang, Jianwei Liu, Junsong Fu · 5 authors
In the development of urban transportation, Intelligent Connected Vehicle (ICV) technology has become a key force in promoting intelligence, sustainability, and efficiency. In particular, the rapid development of electric vehicles (EVs) has led to a growing demand for charging. However, this process risks exposing the private payment information of EV users, including the location of charging stations, the moment of charging, and users' identities. Our paper proposes a blockchain-based distributed privacy-preserving payment scheme named “SecretCharge”, designed to protect users' private information for ICV payment service scenarios. To meet the demands of large-scale applications of ICV, we propose an efficient group signature scheme based on the ElGamal signature, achieving high efficiency in key generation, signing, and verification algorithms. To conceal the payment information of EV users, we sign the data using our group signature scheme and use it as input for a zero-knowledge proof, ensuring that the information can be verified without being disclosed. To eliminate the dependence on third-party billing entities in traditional centralized schemes, we process system payments on the blockchain, achieving decentralization. Finally, our scheme is tested on Ethereum. The experimental results demonstrate our scheme's efficiency and usability, achieving privacy protection for user payment information in ICV.
A MANET (Mobile Ad Hoc Network) is a decentralised, infrastructure-less system inherently vulnerable to a variety of security threats due to its dynamic topology and limited resources. In such networks, traditional trust management approaches, which are typically centralised and resource-intensive, do not meet the security requirements. A hybrid Proof-of- Work (Po W)/Proof-of-Stake (PoS) trust framework that takes advantage of elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) is presented for MANETs. Three factors are considered in calculating the dynamic trust score: node behaviour, energy efficiency, and communication efficiency. As a result of the proposed model, trust evaluation accuracy and transaction validation are enhanced while the computational overhead and latency are minimised. The results show that the system has strong potential for securing and scaling MANET deployments by reducing detection times, controlling overhead, and mitigating the impact of network attacks.
Yonas Teweldemedhin Gebrezgiher, Sekione Reward Jeremiah, Xianjun Deng, Jong Hyuk Park
Vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication is a fundamental technology in the development of intelligent transportation systems, encompassing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), infrastructure (V2I), and pedestrian (V2P) communications. This technology enables connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to interact with their surroundings, significantly enhancing road safety, traffic efficiency, and driving comfort. However, as V2X communication becomes more widespread, it becomes a prime target for adversarial and persistent cyberattacks, posing significant threats to the security and privacy of CAVs. These challenges are compounded by the dynamic nature of vehicular networks and the stringent requirements for real-time data processing and decision-making. Much research is on using novel technologies such as machine learning, blockchain, and cryptography to secure V2X communications. Our survey highlights the security challenges faced by V2X communications and assesses current ML and blockchain-based solutions, revealing significant gaps and opportunities for improvement. Specifically, our survey focuses on studies integrating ML, blockchain, and multi-access edge computing (MEC) for low latency, robust, and dynamic security in V2X networks. Based on our findings, we outline a conceptual framework that synergizes ML, blockchain, and MEC to address some of the identified security challenges. This integrated framework demonstrates the potential for real-time anomaly detection, decentralized data sharing, and enhanced system scalability. The survey concludes by identifying future research directions and outlining the remaining challenges for securing V2X communications in the face of evolving threats.