Blockchain Enabled Intelligent Digital Forensics System for Autonomous Connected Vehicles

Autonomous connected vehicles are revolutionizing the automotive industry vision and impacting their business model. This trend will likely impact other related industries and their business model such as automotive insurance companies, tier-II automotive manufactures, and automotive maintenance service companies. The growing number of connected vehicles will require new policy formulation by the government about privacy and security issues in the era of massive digitalization and automation. Organizations such as 3GPP and IEEE are evolving standards that address security issues for connected vehicles. However, since Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) will play a significant role in 5G networks and beyond, we address the privacy and security issues with a blockchain-based intelligent digital forensics system for autonomous connected vehicles (ACVs) in a connected smart world incorporating artificial intelligence. The proposed system includes a novel algorithm for the autonomous connected vehicles and the users' security and privacy. We utilize short randomizable signatures to anonymously authenticate witness's identities and to protect the witnesses' privacy. Then, we leverage fine-grained access control based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption for evidence access and evaluate the feasibility of the proposed system by simulating the proposed model, its computational costs and communication overhead by implementing a prototype on a local Ethereum blockchain network platform. The simulation results show the proof-of-concept of the proposed system. We envision the application of the proposed system to ensure security and privacy of ACVs and their security applications for use with 5G-V2X and future XG-V2X networks.