A Scalable Protocol for Driving Trust Management in Internet of Vehicles With Blockchain

Recent developments in IoT have facilitated advancements in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) with autonomous vehicles and roadside infrastructure as its key components. IoV aims to provide new innovative services for different modes of transport with adaptive traffic management and enables vehicles to broadcast messages to improve traffic safety and efficiency. However, due to nontrusted environments, it is difficult for vehicles to evaluate the credibility of the messages that they receive. Therefore, trust establishment in IoV is a key security concern that is constantly limited by scalability challenges. This article proposes a blockchain-based protocol for IoV using smart contracts, physical unclonable functions (PUFs), certificates, and a dynamic Proof-of-Work (dPoW) consensus algorithm. The blockchain, in conjunction with contracts, provides a secure framework for registering trusted vehicles and blocking malicious ones. PUFs are used to assign a unique identity to each vehicle via which trust is established. Certificates are issued by roadside units that preserve the privacy of vehicles, whereas the dPoW consensus allows the protocol to scale according to the incoming traffic generated by the vehicles. To demonstrate the feasibility and scalability of the proposed protocol, security and performance analyses are presented. A case study is also discussed along with a comparative analysis, which confirms that our protocol can provide superior decentralized trust management for IoV.