Sybil Attack-Resistant Blockchain-Based Proof-of-Location Mechanism with Privacy Protection in VANET

In this paper, we propose a Proof-of-Location (PoL)-based location verification scheme for mitigating Sybil attacks in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). For this purpose, we employ smart contracts for storing the location information of the vehicles. This smart contract is maintained by Road Side Units (RSUs) and acts as a ground truth for verifying the position information of the neighboring vehicles. To avoid the storage of fake location information inside the smart contract, vehicles need to solve unique computational puzzles generated by the neighboring RSUs in a limited time frame whenever they need to report their location information. Assuming a vehicle has a single Central Processing Unit (CPU) and parallel processing is not allowed, it can solve a single computational puzzle in a given time period. With this approach, the vehicles with multiple fake identities are prevented from solving multiple puzzles at a time. In this way, we can mitigate a Sybil attack and avoid the storage of fake location information in a smart contract table. Furthermore, the RSUs maintain a dedicated blockchain for storing the location information of neighboring vehicles. They take part in mining for the purpose of storing the smart contract table in the blockchain. This scheme guarantees the privacy of the vehicles, which is achieved with the help of a PoL privacy preservation mechanism. The verifier can verify the locations of the vehicles without revealing their privacy. Experimental results show that the proposed mechanism is effective in mitigating Sybil attacks in VANET. According to the experiment results, our proposed scheme provides a lower fake location registration probability, i.e., lower than 10%, compared to other existing approaches. © 2024 by the authors.