Blockchain and trust-based clustering scheme for the IoV

Abstract

The advent of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) leads to the proliferation of services proposed for the users. Its adoption aims mainly to make driving more secure and enhance the users’ quality of experience. However, the deployment of multiple technologies that interact with each other brings out big security challenges. Indeed, it enlarges the attack vectors and surface. In the IoV ecosystem, cybersecurity issues can be driven from the security of communication links, security of devices, identity and liability, access control as well as privacy of drivers and vehicles. Trust management is one of the key mechanisms that can enforce the security of an IoV network. In a previous work (Hbaieb et al., 2021), we proposed a blockchain based trust management framework to enhance IoV security. Our framework showed good performance results. However, it was based on a centralized trust based approach. Thus, its performance is decreasing when dealing with effective scalability. Moreover, we did not focus on the energy consumption of the proposed model. In this paper, we propose an extension to enhance the highlighted limitations. For that, we are based on a decentralized trust process. We, also, introduce a clustering mechanism to construct our framework. Moreover, to take into account the quality of service (QoS) of our framework while enforcing security, we define our clustering process based on different parameters such as the trust value, the safety distance, and the energy factor. The evaluation of our proposal shows relevant results in terms of detection performance, communication overhead and runtime properties. The simulation results indicate that the formation of trustworthy clusters using blockchain reinforces the IoV reliability.