World State Attack to Blockchain Based IoV and Efficient Protection With Hybrid RSUs Architecture

Abstract

Blockchain technology is developing rapidly and has been widely applied in the field of Internet of Vehicles (IoV) to solve trust and security problems. However, due to the high security requirements in IoV scenarios, the security threats of blockchain itself become a big challenge for its applications in IoV. As the largest distributed platform supporting smart contract, Ethereum becomes one of the popular blockchain platforms that has been applied in IoV applications. In Ethereum, the local world state (stored on Road Side Units (RSUs) in IoV) is applied to facilitate account query and transaction verification. However, previous works showed that the local database can be easily tampered, so attackers may issue invalid transactions based on the modified world state, which is not acceptable for IoV applications. In this paper, the success probability and expected time for such an attack are first analyzed theoretically, including the effect of portion of tampered RSUs and the number of required confirmation blocks. Then experiment evaluation verifies the correctness of the theoretical analysis and shows that the attack would succeed with a higher probability within a shorter time when the local database on more RSUs are attacked. On the contrary, increasing of confirmation blocks can effectively reduce the success probability of a single attack and extend the confirmation time of the invalid transaction. Finally, efficient attack detection and recovery methods are proposed based on a novel hierarchical architecture with hybrid RSUs, and the effectiveness and complexity are verified by theoretical analysis and experiments.