A Blockchain-Assisted Road Condition Monitoring Scheme With Privacy-Preserving for VANETs

Connected vehicular cloud computing applies cloud computing to Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), which can provide road condition monitoring services for intelligent transportation systems. However, it brings new security and efficiency challenges to VANETs. Specifically, malicious vehicles may impersonate legitimate vehicles to tamper with or forge road conditions. Cloud servers are not fully trusted entities, the vehicle information, driver information, as well as road conditions uploaded to the cloud may be leaked to an unauthorized party. Moreover, small devices such as on-board units and roadside units have limited computational resources, and thus require light-weight security mechanisms. To address these challenges, this article proposes a blockchain-assisted road condition monitoring scheme with privacy-preserving. It prevents the leakage of sensitive vehicle identity with pseudonyms, protects the privacy of road conditions through encryption, identifies malicious vehicle impersonation attacks with source authentication, and detects dishonest behaviors of cloud servers with blockchain supervision. Our scheme does not rely on expensive bilinear pairing operations, which significantly reduces the computational overheads. Security analysis shows that our proposal can provide unforgeability of authentication request/response, privacy of road conditions, resistance to reply attacks, anonymity of vehicle, and traceability of malicious vehicles. Performance analysis demonstrates that our work has lower computational and communication costs than other existing schemes.