A Review of Research on Privacy Protection of Internet of Vehicles Based on Blockchain

Numerous academic and industrial fields, such as healthcare, banking, and supply chain management, are rapidly adopting and relying on blockchain technology. It has also been suggested for application in the internet of vehicles (IoV) ecosystem as a way to improve service availability and reliability. Blockchain offers decentralized, distributed and tamper-proof solutions that bring innovation to data sharing and management, but do not themselves protect privacy and data confidentiality. Therefore, solutions using blockchain technology must take user privacy concerns into account. This article reviews the proposed solutions that use blockchain technology to provide different vehicle services while overcoming the privacy leakage problem which inherently exists in blockchain and vehicle services. We analyze the key features and attributes of prior schemes and identify their contributions to provide a comprehensive and critical overview. In addition, we highlight prospective future research topics and present research problems

Secure Identity Management Framework for Vehicular Ad-hoc Network using Blockchain

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a mobile network formed by vehicles, roadside units, and other infrastructures that enable communication between the nodes to improve road safety and traffic control. While this technology promises great benefits to drivers, it has many security concerns that are critical to road safety. It is essential to ensure that only authenticated vehicles transmit data and revoked vehicles do not interfere in this communication. Many current VANET technologies also depend on a central trusted authority that can cost computation and communication overhead and be a single point of failure for the network. By using blockchain technology in VANET, we can take advantage of the decentralized and distributed framework and thereby avoid a single point of trust. Moreover, blockchain technology ensures the immutability of the data strengthening the integrity of the system. In the proposed framework, Hyperledger Fabric, a permissioned blockchain technology, is used for identity management in VANET. All the vehicles with their pseudo IDs are registered, validated, and revoked using the blockchain technology. The vehicles in the network check the validity of the safety messages received from the neighboring nodes, using the services provided by the road side units that have access to the blockchain. This framework works on looking-up the pseudo IDs and public keys on the blockchain for their validity, thus promising a light-weight authentication and reduced computation and communication overhead for vehicles to access the safety messages in the network

Blockchain Application on the Internet of Vehicles (IoV)

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its potential integration with the traditional Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), we have witnessed the emergence of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which promises to seamlessly integrate into smart transportation systems. However, the key characteristics of IoV, such as high-speed mobility and frequent disconnections make it difficult to manage its security and privacy. The Blockchain, as a distributed tamper-resistant ledge, has been proposed as an innovative solution that guarantees privacy-preserving yet secure schemes. In this paper, we review recent literature on the application of blockchain to IoV, in particular, and intelligent transportation systems in general

Vehicle Authentication in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network using RSU Based Approach

Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is a pervasive network where vehicles communicate with nearby vehicles and infrastructure nodes, such as Road-side unit (RSU). VANET is the subclass of Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) in which nodes move randomly and are connected wirelessly. Information sharing among vehicles is an essential component of an intelligent traffic system (ITS), but security and privacy concerns must be taken into consideration. Security of the network can be improved by granting access only to authenticated vehicles. This research proposes an RSU based approach to authenticate vehicles and notify vehicles about unauthorized messages/vehicles. It helps in preventing other vehicles in the network from being influenced by the malicious vehicle. In this approach, Blockchain has been used to securely maintain the identity of all vehicles in the network. The use of this RSU based approach helps to reduce the computational overhead on the On-board unit (OBU) of individual vehicles and reduces the processing delay

Using Distributed Ledger Technologies in VANETs to Achieve Trusted Intelligent Transportation Systems

With the recent advancements in the networking realm of computers as well as achieving real-time communication between devices over the Internet, IoT (Internet of Things) devices have been on the rise; collecting, sharing, and exchanging data with other connected devices or databases online, enabling all sorts of communications and operations without the need for human intervention, oversight, or control. This has caused more computer-based systems to get integrated into the physical world, inching us closer towards developing smart cities. The automotive industry, alongside other software developers and technology companies have been at the forefront of this advancement towards achieving smart cities. Currently, transportation networks need to be revamped to utilize the massive amounts of data being generated by the public’s vehicle’s on-board devices, as well as other integrated sensors on public transit systems, local roads, and highways. This will create an interconnected ecosystem that can be leveraged to improve traffic efficiency and reliability. Currently, Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) such as vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V), vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I), and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) communications, all play a major role in supporting road safety, traffic efficiency, and energy savings. To protect these devices and the networks they form from being targets of cyber-related attacks, this paper presents ideas on how to leverage distributed ledger technologies (DLT) to establish secure communication between vehicles that is decentralized, trustless, and immutable. Incorporating IOTA’s protocols, as well as utilizing Ethereum’s smart contracts functionality and application concepts with VANETs, all interoperating with Hyperledger’s Fabric framework, several novel ideas can be implemented to improve traffic safety and efficiency. Such a modular design also opens up the possibility to further investigate use cases of the blockchain and distributed ledger technologies in creating a decentralized intelligent transportation system (ITS)

Blockchain System for Secure and Efficient UAV-to-Vehicle Communication in Smart Cities

In a smart city environment, Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) enables the vehicle to generate and communicate messages for safety applications. There exists a challenge where the integrity of the message needs to be verified before passing it on to other vehicles. There should be a provision to motivate the honest vehicles who are reporting the true event messages. To achieve this, traffic regulations and event detections can be linked with blockchain technology. Any vehicle violating traffic rules will be issued with a penalty by executing the smart contract. In case any accident occurs, the vehicle nearby to the spot can immediately send the event message to Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). It will check for its credibility and proceed with rewards. The authenticity of the vehicle inside the smart city area is verified by registering itself with UAVs deployed near the city entrance. This is enabled to reduce the participation of unauthorized vehicles inside the city zone. The Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA256) and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA-192) are used for communication. The result of computation time for certificate generation and vehicles involvement rate is presented

A secured privacy-preserving multi-level blockchain framework for cluster based VANET

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Existing research shows that Cluster-based Medium Access Control (CB-MAC) protocols perform well in controlling and managing Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET), but requires ensuring improved security and privacy preserving authentication mechanism. To this end, we propose a multi-level blockchain-based privacy-preserving authentication protocol. The paper thoroughly explains the formation of the authentication centers, vehicles registration, and key generation processes. In the proposed architecture, a global authentication center (GAC) is responsible for storing all vehicle information, while Local Authentication Center (LAC) maintains a blockchain to enable quick handover between internal clusters of vehicle. We also propose a modified control packet format of IEEE 802.11 standards to remove the shortcomings of the traditional MAC protocols. Moreover, cluster formation, membership and cluster-head selection, and merging and leaving processes are implemented while considering the safety and non-safety message transmission to increase the performance. All blockchain communication is performed using high speed 5G internet while encrypted information is transmitted while using the RSA-1024 digital signature algorithm for improved security, integrity, and confidentiality. Our proof-of-concept implements the authentication schema while considering multiple virtual machines. With detailed experiments, we show that the proposed method is more efficient in terms of time and storage when compared to the existing methods. Besides, numerical analysis shows that the proposed transmission protocols outperform traditional MAC and benchmark methods in terms of throughput, delay, and packet dropping rate

On M2M Micropayments : A Case Study of Electric Autonomous Vehicles

The proliferation of electric vehicles has spurred the research interest in technologies associated with it, for instance, batteries, and charging mechanisms. Moreover, the recent advancements in autonomous cars also encourage the enabling technologies to integrate and provide holistic applications. To this end, one key requirement for electric vehicles is to have an efficient, secure, and scalable infrastructure and framework for charging, billing, and auditing. However, the current manual charging systems for EVs may not be applicable to the autonomous cars that demand new, automatic, secure, efficient, and scalable billing and auditing mechanism. Owing to the distributed systems such as blockchain technology, in this paper, we propose a new charging and billing mechanism for electric vehicles that charge their batteries in a charging-on-the-move fashion. To meet the requirements of billing in electric vehicles, we leverage distributed ledger technology (DLT), a distributed peer-to-peer technology for micro-transactions. Our proof-of-concept implementation of the billing framework demonstrates the feasibility of such system in electric vehicles. It is also worth noting that the solution can easily be extended to the electric autonomous cars (EACs)

When Data Fly: An Open Data Trading System in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Communication between vehicles and their environment (i.e., vehicle-to-everything or V2X communication) in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has become of particular importance for smart cities. However, economic challenges, such as the cost incurred by data sharing (e.g., due to power consumption), hinder the integration of data sharing in open systems into smart city applications, such as dynamic environmental zones. Moving from open data sharing to open data trading can address the economic challenges and incentivize vehicle drivers to share their data. In this context, integrating distributed ledger technology (DLT) into open systems for data trading is promising for reducing the transaction cost of payments in data trading, avoiding dependencies on third parties, and guaranteeing openness. However, because the integration of DLT conflicts with the short available communication time between fast moving objects in VANETs, it remains unclear how open data trading in VANETs using DLT should be designed to be viable. In this work, we present a system design for data trading in VANETs using DLT. We measure the required communication time for data trading between a vehicle and a roadside unit in a real scenario and estimate the associated cost. Our results show that the proposed system design is technically feasible and economically viable