Regional Blockchain for Vehicular Networks to Prevent 51% Attacks

Abstract

The next generation of vehicles will be autonomous, connected, electric, and intelligent with distinct requirements such as high mobility, low latency, real-time applications, seamless connectivity, and security. Blockchain can provide a good solution to the issue of secure message dissemination or secure information sharing in vehicular networks with a weak trust relationship among the nodes. In this paper, we investigate the design of a regional blockchain for VANETs, where the blockchain is shared among nodes in a geographically bounded area. We investigate how to design the regional blockchain while achieving a low 51% attack success probability. We derive a condition that guarantees a low 51% attack success probability in terms of the numbers of good nodes and malicious nodes, the message delivery time, and the puzzle computation time. The condition can provide a useful guideline for selection of several control parameters guaranteeing the stable operation of the blockchain. We run several simulations to show the validity of the condition and investigate the effects of various parameters on the 51% attack success probability. Our analysis and simulation results show that maintaining a low message delivery time for good nodes is very important in protecting the stability of the blockchain system.INDEX TERMS Blockchain, regional blockchain, security, 51% attack, immutability attack.

Blockchain for Vehicular Internet of Things: Recent Advances and Open Issues

“…Most studies use RSUs, cloud servers, or edge servers as miners. A small number of studies discuss the use of vehicles as miners [ 66 , 68 , 70 , 74 , 76 , 83 , 86 , 90 ]. The current studies basically assume that the vehicles are connected to the blockchain network through the RSUs.…”

“…Shrestha et al [ 70 ] discussed the security risks of a regional blockchain in VANETs in terms of the density of malicious vehicles, the complexity of the puzzle in PoW, and block message dissemination delay. They used computer simulations to show that the security risks can be basically eliminated if a certain condition is met.…”

Evolution of V2X Communication and Integration of Blockchain for Security Enhancements

“…The use of blockchain in vehicular networks is affected by several challenges and we discuss some of them here. Several new or modified blockchain have been proposed, such as [70,71], to reduce the average puzzle computation time and lower the block message delivery delays in a geographically bounded area, as shown in Table 7. In Ref.…”

Blockchain‐based security aspects in heterogeneous Internet‐of‐Things networks: A survey

“…Considering the importance of the information that a vehicular network will be able to provide, its security and scalability issues should get utmost importance. Recently, researchers from academia and industry are trying to resolve these issues with the help of BC integration in vehicular networks system . The BC‐based vehicular network can operate in a distributed manner to build a new, reliable, and secure distributed transport management system.…”

“…Recently, researchers from academia and industry are trying to resolve these issues with the help of BC integration in vehicular networks system. 87 The BC-based vehicular network can operate in a distributed manner to build a new, reliable, and secure distributed transport management system. Some efforts have already been made in which BC is used to resolve critical message dissemination issues in VANET.…”