SIoVChain: Time-Lock Contract Based Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing in SIoV

Social Internet of Vehicles (SIoV) is an emerging technology in the smart city environment, enabling smart vehicles to form social groups and exchange data among themselves. SIoV facilitates many applications aiming to improve driving safety and traffic monitoring by sharing data among vehicles. It ensures a safe and comfortable drive. However, privacy, data confidentiality, and data integrity are the major challenges during multi-hop data transfer that must be addressed for the wide adoption of SIoV. The existing solutions do not provide anonymity and consume more network resources. To address these issues, we propose SIoVChain, a time-lock contract-based privacy-preserving data sharing scheme with incentives for SIoV. It does not only enable data sharing between vehicles anonymously but incentivizes them also. In addition, the proposed framework imposes a penalty anonymously if a malicious vehicle disseminates false information. SIoVChain is shown to be secure against stealing processing fee attack while preserving sender-receiver privacy and path privacy. Universal Composability (UC) framework is used to verify user privacy. The feasibility and efficiency of the scheme are also demonstrated.