BEAT-Traffic: a Blockchain-Enabled infrastructure for Anonymous-yet-Traceable Traffic reporting

Abstract

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) have become increasingly popular in recent years, and are viewed as the future of transportation. These systems rely heavily on open communication networks to ensure road safety and efficiency. However, the rapid and secure sharing of information over large-scale cyber-physical systems such as ITS poses significant challenges, including data lineage, data consistency, access rights management, and privacy preservation. In this paper, we propose a solution to improve the sharing of sensitive data over ITS using blockchains and distributed cryptography. We demonstrate how these technologies can be applied to the reporting of Road Hazard Warnings, creating a blockchain-based data collection system that ensures the dissemination and security of reported messages. Our approach combines blockchains and group signatures to achieve the necessary security properties, including privacy preservation and censorship resistance, while maintaining performance levels comparable to existing literature. We provide a theoretical analysis of the solution's security properties and expected performance characteristics. Our results demonstrate the potential of blockchain-based solutions for addressing the challenges of secure and efficient information sharing in ITS. We believe that our work will contribute to the development of secure and privacy-preserving ITS systems, and encourage further exploration of blockchain-based solutions in the field of intelligent transportation.