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

Named Data Networking in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks: State-of-the-Art and Challenges

International audienceInformation-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today's Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the recent implementations of ICN that provides a suitable communication approach due to its clean slate design and simple communication model. There are a plethora of applications realized through ICN in different domains where data is the focal point of communication. One such domain is Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) realized through Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) where vehicles exchange information and content with each other and with the infrastructure. To date, excellent research results have been yielded in the VANET domain aiming at safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience. However, due to the dynamic topologies, host-centric model, and ephemeral nature of vehicular communication, various challenges are faced by VANET that hinder the realization of successful vehicular networks and adversely affect the data dissemination, content delivery, and user experiences. To fill these gaps, NDN has been extensively used as underlying communication paradigm for VANET. Inspired by the extensive research results in NDN-based VANET, in this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of NDN-driven VANET. More precisely, we investigate the role of NDN in VANET and discuss the feasibility of NDN architecture in VANET environment. Subsequently, we cover in detail, NDN-based naming, routing and forwarding, caching, mobility, and security mechanism for VANET. Furthermore, we discuss the existing standards, solutions, and simulation tools used in NDN-based VANET. Finally, we also identify open challenges and issues faced by NDN-driven VANET and highlight future research directions that should be addressed by the research community

A Comparative Survey of VANET Clustering Techniques

© 2016 Crown. A vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a mobile ad hoc network in which network nodes are vehicles - most commonly road vehicles. VANETs present a unique range of challenges and opportunities for routing protocols due to the semi-organized nature of vehicular movements subject to the constraints of road geometry and rules, and the obstacles which limit physical connectivity in urban environments. In particular, the problems of routing protocol reliability and scalability across large urban VANETs are currently the subject of intense research. Clustering can be used to improve routing scalability and reliability in VANETs, as it results in the distributed formation of hierarchical network structures by grouping vehicles together based on correlated spatial distribution and relative velocity. In addition to the benefits to routing, these groups can serve as the foundation for accident or congestion detection, information dissemination and entertainment applications. This paper explores the design choices made in the development of clustering algorithms targeted at VANETs. It presents a taxonomy of the techniques applied to solve the problems of cluster head election, cluster affiliation, and cluster management, and identifies new directions and recent trends in the design of these algorithms. Additionally, methodologies for validating clustering performance are reviewed, and a key shortcoming - the lack of realistic vehicular channel modeling - is identified. The importance of a rigorous and standardized performance evaluation regime utilizing realistic vehicular channel models is demonstrated

Blockchain Based Decentralized Applications & Trust Management for VANETs

Decentralized vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), a promising technology to improve the Intelligent Transportation System (ITSs), face severe lagging in actual deployment and its extensive usage due to major unresolved issues such as security, data reliability, user privacy, and safe routing protocols. To overcome these issues, there is an urge to identify a platform that best suits VANET's easy deployment and usage in a decentralized fashion. In this regard, blockchain has received much attention as an emerging technology to provide better security on data sharing among many participants without an intermediary. This thesis aims to investigate blockchain technology's capability to secure vehicular data and vehicular node trust scores over a tamper-proof decentralized ledger that guarantees security, immutability, and accountability in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks such as VANET.Firstly, we explore how to leverage blockchain technology to design a specific application in the domain of decentralized VANETs, such as ride-sharing. We analyze the decentralized architecture for this application using smart contracts, and through experiments, we evaluate the costs associated with it. This framework serves as a basis for our further study to solve more challenging research problems in the consensus algorithm. The choice of a consensus algorithm directly affects the performance of a blockchain-based system in terms of transaction confirmation delays. In a VANET based on blockchain, the Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus might not be the best selection due to resource constraints and unfairness, respectively. In an attempt to improve consensus in a VANET application based on blockchain, we present the design of a novel consensus mechanism named Proof Of Driving for our previously presented ride-sharing application. We demonstrated that POD clubbed with a real-time service standard score protocol efficiently optimizes the number of miner nodes. The extensive experimental and security analyses presented on proposed consensus and service standard protocols demonstrate the effectiveness, security, and feasibility of miner node selection. However, VANET is not secure as vehicular communication is critically vulnerable to several kinds of active and passive routing protocol attacks. The most severe attack in routing is the Black Hole attack, which deteriorates the network's performance by dropping or misusing the intercepted data packets without forwarding them to the correct destination. This greatly hinders the application availability. Hence in the final chapter of this thesis, we experiment by incorporating trust models in VANET routing protocols to achieve a more efficient packet forwarding process. The results showed an improved packet delivery ratio and throughput of the entire network. The trust model should be able to resist various attacks and preserve the privacy of vehicles simultaneously. Hence we presented how to leverage consortium blockchain to secure vehicles' trust scores and distribute node trust in a decentralized network more efficiently. We evaluated the trust score aggregation process by the authorized RSUs, the time consumed for consensus, and updated trust score distribution. The results showed that the blockchain-based trust management provides an effective trust model for VANETs with transparency, conditional anonymity, efficiency, and robustness while efficiently eliminates the black hole nodes