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

Security and Privacy Preservation in Mobile Advertising

Mobile advertising is emerging as a promising advertising strategy, which leverages prescriptive analytics, location-based distribution, and feedback-driven marketing to engage consumers with timely and targeted advertisements. In the current mobile advertising system, a third-party ad broker collects and manages advertisements for merchants who would like to promote their business to mobile users. Based on its large-scale database of user profiles, the ad broker can help the merchants to better reach out to customers with related interests and charges the merchants for ad dissemination services. Recently, mobile advertising technology has dominated the digital advertising industry and has become the main source of income for IT giants. However, there are many security and privacy challenges that may hinder the continuous success of the mobile advertising industry. First, there is a lack of advertising transparency in the current mobile advertising system. For example, mobile users are concerned about the reliability and trustworthiness of the ad dissemination process and advertising review system. Without proper countermeasures, mobile users can install ad-blocking software to filter out irrelevant or even misleading advertisements, which may lower the advertising investments from merchants. Second, as more strict privacy regulations (e.g. European General Data Privacy Regulations) take effect, it is critical to protect mobile users’ personal profiles from illegal sharing and exposure in the mobile advertising system. In this thesis, three security and privacy challenges for the mobile advertising system are identified and addressed with the designs, implementations, and evaluations of a blockchain-based architecture. First, we study the anonymous review system for the mobile advertising industry. When receiving advertisements from a specific merchant (e.g. a nearby restaurant), mobile users are more likely to browse the previous reviews about the merchant for quality-of-service assessments. However, current review systems are known for the lack of system transparency and are subject to many attacks, such as double reviews and deletions of negative reviews. We exploit the tamper-proof nature and the distributed consensus mechanism of the blockchain technology, to design a blockchain-based review system for mobile advertising, where review accumulations are transparent and verifiable to the public. To preserve user review privacy, we further design an anonymous review token generation scheme, where users are encouraged to leave reviews anonymously while still ensuring the review authenticity. We also explore the implementation challenges of the blockchain-based system on an Ethereum testing network and the experimental results demonstrate the application feasibility of the proposed anonymous review system. Second, we investigate the transparency issues for the targeted ad dissemination process. Specifically, we focus on a specific mobile advertising application: vehicular local advertising, where vehicular users send spatial-keyword queries to ad brokers to receive location-aware advertisements. To build a transparent advertising system, the ad brokers are required to provide mobile users with explanations on the ad dissemination process, e.g., why a specific ad is disseminated to a mobile user. However, such transparency explanations are often found incomplete and sometimes even misleading, which may lower the user trust on the advertising system if without proper countermeasures. Therefore, we design an advertising smart contract to efficiently realize a publicly verifiable spatial-keyword query scheme. Instead of directly implementing the spatial-keyword query scheme on the smart contract with prohibitive storage and computation cost, we exploit the on/off-chain computation models to trade the expensive on-chain cost for cheap off-chain cost. With two design strategies: digest-and-verify and divide-then-assemble, the on-chain cost for a single spatial keyword query is reduced to constant regardless of the scale of the spatial-keyword database. Extensive experiments are conducted to provide both on-chain and off-chain benchmarks with a verifiable computation framework. Third, we explore another critical requirement of the mobile advertising system: public accountability enforcement against advertising misconducts, if (1) mobile users receive irrelevant ads, or (2) advertising policies of merchants are not correctly computed in the ad dissemination process. This requires the design of a composite Succinct Non-interactive ARGument (SNARG) system, that can be tailored for different advertising transparency requirements and is efficient for the blockchain implementations. Moreover, pursuing public accountability should also achieve a strict privacy guarantee for the user profile. We also propose an accountability contract which can receive explanation requirements from both mobile users and merchants. To promote prompt on-chain responses, we design an incentive mechanism based on the pre-deposits of involved parties, i.e., ad brokers, mobile users, and merchants. If any advertising misconduct is identified, public accountability can be enforced by confiscating the pre-deposits of the misbehaving party. Comprehensive experiments and analyses are conducted to demonstrate the versatile functionalities and feasibility of the accountability contract. In summary, we have designed, implemented, and evaluated a blockchain-based architecture for security and privacy preservations in the mobile advertising. The designed architecture can not only enhance the transparency and accountability for the mobile advertising system, but has also achieved notably on-chain efficiency and privacy for real-world implementations. The results from the thesis may shed light on the future research and practice of a blockchain-based architecture for the privacy regulation compliance in the mobile advertising

Machine learning and blockchain technologies for cybersecurity in connected vehicles

Future connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) must be secured againstcyberattacks for their everyday functions on the road so that safety of passengersand vehicles can be ensured. This article presents a holistic review of cybersecurityattacks on sensors and threats regardingmulti-modal sensor fusion. A compre-hensive review of cyberattacks on intra-vehicle and inter-vehicle communicationsis presented afterward. Besides the analysis of conventional cybersecurity threatsand countermeasures for CAV systems,a detailed review of modern machinelearning, federated learning, and blockchain approach is also conducted to safe-guard CAVs. Machine learning and data mining-aided intrusion detection systemsand other countermeasures dealing with these challenges are elaborated at theend of the related section. In the last section, research challenges and future direc-tions are identified

Use of Blockchain in Strengthening Cybersecurity And Protecting Privacy

Abstract—The purpose of this study is to highlight and prove the positive impact in which blockchain could have on today’s IoT environment in terms of providing Cybersecurity for not just organizations, but other individuals who share data via the internet. The current IoT environs operates on a centralized cloud based server, meanwhile block chain operates on a decentralized server. The differentiation between the both plays a major role in the level of security they both provide; whereby, decentralized systems are less vulnerable to cyber-attacks and centralized ones are not. In this report, real life illustrations are used to justify the knowledge that the block chain security could serve as a saving grace for internet users. Also, this form of security seems to be the only way to eradicate all forms of insecurity in supply chain and IoT breaches for businesses. An in depth understanding on how the block chain system operates would show why it’s held with such high hopes and how it can be beneficial for a wide range of industries. However, this research also highlights some difficulties that might arise in implementing the block chain system. It also gives ways in which the system can be gradually implemented. Firstly, the government needs to make it mandatory for businesses that deal with national based confidential data to implement block chain in their supply chain system to boost security. Secondly, top company officials like C.E. O’s need to take genuine interest in the block chain technology by investing in its development and making it a part of employee training, which in the long run would benefit the economy and business in return. Thirdly, a merge of more public and private businesses would help push the use of block chain further. Lastly, the government should make the block chain technology easily accessible, making the official permission to implement -easy and cost effective

A Content Poisoning Attack Detection and Prevention System in Vehicular Named Data Networking

Named data networking (NDN) is gaining momentum in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) thanks to its robust network architecture. However, vehicular NDN (VNDN) faces numerous challenges, including security, privacy, routing, and caching. Specifically, the attackers can jeopardize vehicles’ cache memory with a Content Poisoning Attack (CPA). The CPA is the most difficult to identify because the attacker disseminates malicious content with a valid name. In addition, NDN employs request–response-based content dissemination, which is inefficient in supporting push-based content forwarding in VANET. Meanwhile, VNDN lacks a secure reputation management system. To this end, our contribution is three-fold. We initially propose a threshold-based content caching mechanism for CPA detection and prevention. This mechanism allows or rejects host vehicles to serve content based on their reputation. Secondly, we incorporate a blockchain system that ensures the privacy of every vehicle at roadside units (RSUs). Finally, we extend the scope of NDN from pull-based content retrieval to push-based content dissemination. The experimental evaluation results reveal that our proposed CPA detection mechanism achieves a 100% accuracy in identifying and preventing attackers. The attacker vehicles achieved a 0% cache hit ratio in our proposed mechanism. On the other hand, our blockchain results identified tempered blocks with 100% accuracy and prevented them from storing in the blockchain network. Thus, our proposed solution can identify and prevent CPA with 100% accuracy and effectively filters out tempered blocks. Our proposed research contribution enables the vehicles to store and serve trusted content in VNDN

Blockchain based secure message dissemination in vehicular networks

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are one of the key elements in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to enable information exchange among vehicles and Roadside Units (RSUs) via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to- nfrastructure (V2I) communications. With continuously increasing number of vehicles on road, there are numerous security and privacy challenges associated with VANETs. Communication among vehicles is needed to be secure and bandwidth efficient. Also, the messages exchanged between vehicles must be authentic so as to maintain a trusted network in a privacy-preserving manner. Furthermore, a sustainable economic model is required to incentivise honest and cooperative vehicles. Traditional security and privacy solutions in centralised networks are not applicable to VANETs due to its distributed nature, heterogeneity, high mobility and low latency requirements. Meanwhile, the new development of blockchain has been attracting significant interests due to its key features including consensus to evaluate message credibility and immutable storage in distributed ledger, which provides an alternative solution to the security and privacy challenges in VANETs. This thesis aims to present blockchain solutions for the security and privacy of VANETs meeting the stringent requirements of low latency and bandwidth-efficient message dissemination. VANETs are simulated in OMNeT++ to validate the proposed solutions. Specifically, two novel blockchain consensus algorithms have been developed for message authentication and relay selection in presence of malicious vehicles. The first employs a voting based message validation and relay selection, which reduces the failure rate in message validation by 11% as compared to reputation based consensus. The second utilises federated learning supported by blockchain as a better privacy-preserving solution, which is 65.2% faster than the first voting based solution. Both approaches include blockchain-based incentive mechanisms and game theory analysis to observe strategic behaviour of honest and malicious vehicles. To further study the privacy aspect of vehicular networks, the integration of blockchain with physical layer security is also theoretically analysed in Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communications scenarios. The integration results in 8.2 Mbps increased goodput as compared to the blockchain solution alone. In essence, our research work shows that blockchain can offer better control and security, as compared to centralised solutions, if properly adjusted according to the application and network requirements. Thus, the proposed solutions can provide guidelines for practically feasible application of blockchain in vehicular networks