Proof-of-Event Recording System for Autonomous Vehicles: A Blockchain-Based Solution

Autonomous vehicles are capable of sensing their environment and navigating without any human inputs. However, when autonomous vehicles are involved in accidents between themselves or with human subjects, liability must be indubitably decided based on accident forensics. This paper proposes a blockchain-inspired event recording system for autonomous vehicles. Specifically, we design the mechanism of “Proof-of-Event” with a dynamic federation consensus to achieve indisputable accident forensics by providing trustable and verifiable event information. We propose a dynamic federation consensus scheme to verify and confirm the new block of event data in an efficient way without any central authority. We conduct numerical analyses and prototyped experiments based on the proposed fast leader election algorithm and the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain network. The results show that our system is effective and feasible in generating and storing accident records in blockchain-based vehicular networks. The security capability of the proposed scheme is also discussed against multiple threats and attack scenarios.