BPSAC: A Blockchain and PUF-Enabled Security Architecture With C-IDS for Maritime Intelligent Transportation Systems

Blockchain-enabled security mechanisms play a crucial role in Maritime Intelligent Transportation Systems (MITSs). However, the growing dependence on network communication and data exchange raises serious privacy concerns. While numerous authentication schemes exist for MITSs to prevent unauthorized access, most exhibit limited scalability, high computational costs, and vulnerability to physical attacks, hindering their practical implementation. Still, the transmission of authentication information relies on open networks, exposing the system to diverse network attacks. To cope with these issues, a blockchain-enabled security architecture with Physically Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and consensus-based intrusion detection system (BPSAC) is proposed to protect privacy and ensure resilience against various network attacks. The architecture comprises a security authentication mechanism and a novel consensus-based intrusion detection system (C-IDS). Specifically, the security authentication mechanism mitigates performance overhead and privacy concerns by introducing PUFs. Subsequently, C-IDS is designed for intrusion detection without sacrificing the security of the model inference process by introducing a Differential Channel and Spatial Attention (DCSA) module, and an enhanced Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm named MI-PBFT. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed security authentication mechanism reduces the computational overhead by at least 20% and the communication overhead by 5% compared to recent works. The proposed detection model achieves an attack detection accuracy of over 99% on the UNSW-NB15, KDDCup99, and NSL-KDD datasets. Furthermore, as the number of consensus nodes increases, MI-PBFT consensus algorithm reduces the transaction confirmation delay by 32% and improves the transactions per second by 80% compared to PBFT.