Abstract
Being able to obtain various environmental and driving data from vehicles is becoming more and more important for current and future intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) to operate efficiently and economically. However, the limitations of privacy protection and security of the current ITSs are hindering users and vehicles from providing data. In this paper, we propose a new ITS architecture by using blockchain technology solving the privacy protection and security problems, and promoting users and vehicles to provide data to ITSs. The proposed architecture uses blockchain as a trust infrastructure to protect users’ privacy and provide trustworthy services to users. It is also compatible with the legacy ITS infrastructure and services. In addition, the hierarchical organization of chains enables the scalability of the system, and the use of smart contracts provides a flexible way for introducing new services in the ITS. The proposed architecture is demonstrated by a proof of concept implementation based on Ethereum. The test results show that the proposed architecture is feasible.
Highlights
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) aim at facilitating urban mobility economically and ecologically by connecting vehicles with the network infrastructure and using various information services
The authors in [20] propose a method for signing a consent form through a distributed App [21] connected to a set of smart contracts deployed in the GHOST blockchain network, so that certain functions of the network can be used by the users
Requirement of the blockchain nodes. To deal with these challenges, we introduce an ITS architecture with blockchain overlay, where the blockchains are organized in three layers and different types of blockchain nodes can co-exist in order to provide the scalability and reduce the requirement on the capability of blockchain nodes
Summary
Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) aim at facilitating urban mobility economically and ecologically by connecting vehicles with the network infrastructure and using various information services. Current ITS architectures and services are based on centralized clouds where vehicles and users are identified, authorized and authenticated, and services are provided. In such architectures the cloud servers may become a bottleneck and a single point of failure that can disrupt the whole network, and a target for security attacks and the source of privacy leaks. No general method for providing secure services and privacy protection in vehicular networks has been given. The proposed blockchain-assisted ITS (Ba-ITS) can provide privacy protection to users and an incentive mechanism which encourages users to contribute data to ITS, but it is backward compatible with the legacy ITS.
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