Blockchain-Based Secured IPFS-Enable Event Storage Technique With Authentication Protocol in VANET

Abstract

In recent decades, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have improved drivers' safety and have shared information (such as traffic congestion and accidents) in a very efficient way. However, the privacy of vehicles and the security of event information is a major concern. The problem of secure sharing of event information without compromising the trusted third party (TTP) and data storage is the main issue in ITS. Blockchain technologies can resolve this problem. A work has been published on blockchain-based protocol for secure sharing of events and authentication of vehicles. This protocol addresses the issue of the safe storing of event information. However, authentication of vehicles solely depends on the cloud server. As a result, their scheme utilizes the notion of partially decentralized architecture. This paper proposes a novel decentralized architecture for the vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) without the cloud server. This work also presents a protocol for securing event information and vehicle authentication using the blockchain mechanism. In this protocol, the registered user accesses the event information securely from the interplanetary file system (IPFS). We incorporate the IPFS, along with blockchain, to store the information in a fully distributed manner. The proposed protocol is compared with the state-of-the-art. The comparison provides desirable security at a reasonable cost. The evaluation of the proposed smart contract in terms of cost (GAS) is also discussed.