Towards Secure Blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles: Optimizing Consensus Management Using Reputation and Contract Theory

In Internet of Vehicles (IoV), data sharing among vehicles is essential to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. To ensure data sharing security and traceability, highefficiency Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus scheme as a hard security solution is utilized to establish blockchain-enabled IoV (BIoV). However, as miners are selected from miner candidates by stake-based voting, it is difficult to defend against voting collusion between the candidates and compromised high-stake vehicles, which introduces serious security challenges to the BIoV. To address such challenges, we propose a soft security enhancement solution including two stages: (i) miner selection and (ii) block verification. In the first stage, a reputation-based voting scheme for the blockchain is proposed to ensure secure miner selection. This scheme evaluates candidates' reputation by using both historical interactions and recommended opinions from other vehicles. The candidates with high reputation are selected to be active miners and standby miners. In the second stage, to prevent internal collusion among the active miners, a newly generated block is further verified and audited by the standby miners. To incentivize the standby miners to participate in block verification, we formulate interactions between the active miners and the standby miners by using contract theory, which takes block verification security and delay into consideration. Numerical results based on a real-world dataset indicate that our schemes are secure and efficient for data sharing in BIoV.Comment: 12 pages, submitted for possible journal publicatio

Blockchain-Enabled Federated Learning Approach for Vehicular Networks

Data from interconnected vehicles may contain sensitive information such as location, driving behavior, personal identifiers, etc. Without adequate safeguards, sharing this data jeopardizes data privacy and system security. The current centralized data-sharing paradigm in these systems raises particular concerns about data privacy. Recognizing these challenges, the shift towards decentralized interactions in technology, as echoed by the principles of Industry 5.0, becomes paramount. This work is closely aligned with these principles, emphasizing decentralized, human-centric, and secure technological interactions in an interconnected vehicular ecosystem. To embody this, we propose a practical approach that merges two emerging technologies: Federated Learning (FL) and Blockchain. The integration of these technologies enables the creation of a decentralized vehicular network. In this setting, vehicles can learn from each other without compromising privacy while also ensuring data integrity and accountability. Initial experiments show that compared to conventional decentralized federated learning techniques, our proposed approach significantly enhances the performance and security of vehicular networks. The system's accuracy stands at 91.92\%. While this may appear to be low in comparison to state-of-the-art federated learning models, our work is noteworthy because, unlike others, it was achieved in a malicious vehicle setting. Despite the challenging environment, our method maintains high accuracy, making it a competent solution for preserving data privacy in vehicular networks.Comment: 7 page

Distributed Anonymity Based on Blockchain in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network by Block Size Calibrating

The network connectivity problem is one of the critical challenges of an anonymous server implementation in the VANET. The objective and main contribution of this paper are to assure the anonymity in VANET environments. In the proposed blockchain method, before packaging transactions into blocks, anonymity risk reduced through techniques such as k-anonymity, graph processing, dummy node, and silence period. This paper addresses the challenges of anonymous servers, such as update challenges and single point of failure, by exploiting append-only, distributed, and anonymity features. Although mounting the blockchain process with asymmetric cryptography solves the connectivity challenge, start-up delay and network overhead are severe. The significant feature of the proposed method solves this delay challenge by aggregating many transactions into a block and fixing constraint range of multicasting blocks. Also, aggregating transactions of various end-users into a block preserves the path anonymity. The asymmetric cryptography with ring public and private keys protects the identity anonymity as well as unlinkability. The robust anonymity mechanism existence and the traceability of all transactions constitute the main advantages of the proposed method. The simulation is running by the python to evaluate blockchain performance in VANET with connectivity failure and rapidly changing topology. The results indicate the stabilization of the proposed method in the VANET environment

Immutable Autobiography of Smart Cars Leveraging Blockchain Technology

The popularity of smart cars is increasing around the world as they offer a wide range of services and conveniences. These smart cars are equipped with a variety of sensors generating a large amount of data, many of which are critical. Besides, there are multiple parties involved in the lifespan of a smart car, such as manufacturers, car owners, government agencies, and third-party service providers who also generate data about the vehicle. In addition to managing and sharing data amongst these entities in a secure and privacy-friendly way which is a great challenge itself, there exists a trust deficit about some types of data as they remain under the custody of the car owner (e.g. satellite navigation and mileage data) and can easily be manipulated. In this paper, we propose a blockchain assisted architecture enabling the owner of a smart car to create an immutable record of every data, called the autobiography of a car, generated within its lifespan. We also explain how the trust about this record is guaranteed by the immutability characteristic of the blockchain. Furthermore, the paper describes how the proposed architecture enables a secure and privacy-preserving mechanism for sharing of smart car data among different parties

Blockchain for Cyber-Physical Systems

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are the intelligent systems that offer an interaction among computational, software, and networking resources in a continuous and dynamic fashion. Future systems are likely to be created and developed using CPSs, which have been recognized as a significant area of research. The electric power grid, energy systems, body area networks, modern vehicles, smart homes, cooperative robotics, and smart transportation are the examples for CPS. The security aspects of CPSs can be enhanced with blockchain (BC) technology. For instance, with the combination of CPSs and blockchain, a peer-to-peer energy market is made possible where machines may automatically buy and sell energy based on parameters specified by the user. In this chapter, we summarize recent developments in the creation and applications of CPS, the state-of-the-art and pertinent concepts, numerous CPS applications that have employed blockchain, relevant solutions, and open challenging issues