TriBoDeS: A Tri-Blockchain-Based Detection and Sharing Scheme for Dangerous Road Condition Information in Internet of Vehicles

Bad weather or environmental factors, particularly in remote mountain areas, may result in unsafe driving conditions and consequently road traffic accidents. As the deployment of large-scale sensing nodes for reporting road conditions is too expensive, the crowdsourcing method or reporting by sensors in vehicles themselves will be easier to deploy and more practical. However, those participant sensing methods impose some difficulties, such as fake information, reporter misbehavior, and timeliness. Thus, we propose a tri-blockchain-based Internet of Vehicles system, called TriBoDeS, to facilitate real-time information detection and sharing. It is designed to guarantee concurrency and security to dynamically store, manage, and share information uploaded by vehicles with great efficiency. Such information will be announced on the blockchain under the autonomous identification of vehicles in low-trust conditions. In order to ensure the software’s security, TriBoDeS can monitor the software’s state, detect identified malicious activities, and respond accordingly. To ensure data security, a role-based management mechanism is introduced to achieve fine-grained control over permissions, and confidence rules are established to guarantee the authenticity of the data. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed scheme, we evaluate its performance (e.g., computing and communication overheads) and security (e.g., resiliency against common attacks) over a consortium blockchain. The experimental results demonstrate that, under the conditions of a sufficient number of vehicles, the TriBoDeS system is capable of real-time information sharing while ensuring the security of user information. Compared to conventional single-chain systems, the TriBoDeS system achieves a 2.75-time improvement in efficiency.