Multichain-Assisted Lightweight Security for Code Mutated False Data Injection Attacks in Connected Autonomous Vehicles

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) comprise a whole infrastructure of conventional vehicles, Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs), roadside units, and communication equipment. As a result, a variety of smart sensors, cloud, and edge services are used. Due to the Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication involved in these, the infrastructure becomes prone to security attacks. The most common of these is False Data Injection Attack (FDIA), which causes serious consequences upon driving decisions of a CAV. Blockchain is an ascending technology to provide proficient data security solutions; however, its implementation in securing CAV data is restricted due to its parallel reliance on cloud services. Furthermore, a standalone blockchain is prone to transaction verification delay and reduced transaction throughput, which is intolerable in the fast-paced CAV communication. This paper presents a novel framework enabling multichain, an open-source blockchain platform. Components of the proposed framework include multiple blockchains running on CAVs. The hashing algorithm operates on their Basic Safety Messages (BSMs), inputted to it as blockchain transactions. Our findings reveal that this multichain framework eliminates reliance on cloud services by devising a fully decentralized security solution against stealthy FDIAs that jeopardize a CAV’s lane-changing. It provides an economy-building point for the CAV-metaverse by incentivizing the participating CAVs. Further, it manages transactions by employing multiple parallel blockchains for enhanced throughput. CAVs perform these security checks in as low as a few milliseconds compared to the existing centralized and computationally intensive frameworks.