Securing parked vehicle assisted fog computing with blockchain and optimal smart contract design

Abstract

Vehicular fog computing &#x0028 VFC &#x0029 has been envisioned as an important application of fog computing in vehicular networks. Parked vehicles with embedded computation resources could be exploited as a supplement for VFC. They cooperate with fog servers to process offloading requests at the vehicular network edge, leading to a new paradigm called parked vehicle assisted fog computing &#x0028 PVFC &#x0029 . However, each coin has two sides. There is a follow-up challenging issue in the distributed and trustless computing environment. The centralized computation offloading without tamper-proof audit causes security threats. It could not guard against false-reporting, free-riding behaviors, spoofing attacks and repudiation attacks. Thus, we leverage the blockchain technology to achieve decentralized PVFC. Request posting, workload undertaking, task evaluation and reward assignment are organized and validated automatically through smart contract executions. Network activities in computation offloading become transparent, verifiable and traceable to eliminate security risks. To this end, we introduce network entities and design interactive smart contract operations across them. The optimal smart contract design problem is formulated and solved within the Stackelberg game framework to minimize the total payments for users. Security analysis and extensive numerical results are provided to demonstrate that our scheme has high security and efficiency guarantee.