A Distributed Anonymous Reputation System for V2X Communication

Real-time traffic and road conditions shared by the V2X system lead to efficient urban management, but privacy is easily compromised when the shared information is bound to vehicle identification. Furthermore, false information shared by malicious vehicles affects the fairness of the information and threatens road safety. Therefore, it is essential to realize privacy-preserving trust management in V2X communication. Previously, Lu et. al. proposed a blockchain-based anonymous reputation system (BARS) to establish a privacy-preserving trust model for V2X communication. However, BARS seems to have a scalability disadvantage because the certificate update processes are centralized. In this paper, a distributed anonymous reputation system for V2X communication is proposed. The proposed system distributes the task to update the vehicles’ reputation certificates to RSUs, in which the nearest RSU updates the certificate anonymously at the end of each interval. This approach resolves the bottleneck in the certificate update process and improves the scalability.