DDoS Attack Prevention in Autonomous Vehicle’s OTA Updates: Combining PBFT Consensus and Distributed Firewall in Hyperledger Fabric Blockchain

The advent of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) is bringing forth a revolutionary new era of technology transforming transportation. For traffic to be optimized and safe, efficient vehicle-to-everything collaboration and improved autonomous vehicles (AV) decision-making are crucial. It becomes essential to make decisions in real time using information from vehicle sensors, software, and traffic data. As a part of such an In-Vehicle Network (IVN), over-the-air (OTA) software update service in CAVs needs to be facilitated rapidly, reliably, and securely. However, by taking advantage of vulnerabilities, attackers may quickly target the OTA software update as part of botnets to execute distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The enormous volume and widespread nature of these DDoS cyber-attacks make it vital for the CAV industry to work quickly on identifying and preventing these threats. This paper proposes proof-of-concept experiments with the Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) Blockchain model to detect and prevent DDoS attacks in CAVs, OTA update systems. The proposed method implements Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) as the consensus mechanism and a distributed firewall to ensure the ledger is secure and tamper’ proof. The system is tested on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) Blockchain (BC) platform. The results show that the proposed approach effectively prevents DDoS attacks while ensuring fast transaction execution time.