Blockchain-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Traffic Route Management Scheme for Fog-Based Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Traffic route management is essential for reducing traffic jams and enhancing driving safety because of the growing number of vehicles and frequent occurrence of traffic accidents. However, in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), real-time messages are transmitted via wireless channels, which can result in security and privacy concerns. Existing proposals for traffic route management exist security vulnerabilities, as well as high calculation and communication costs. Encouraged by this fact, we design a lightweight traffic route management scheme for fog-based VANETs. In this scheme, vehicles utilize homomorphic encryption to encrypt their driving routes and then send the encrypted information to a fog node. The traffic management center (TMC) decrypts the received ciphertexts that are aggregated by the fog node and performs traffic management according to the decrypted data, without knowing individual route of each vehicle. Furthermore, blockchain is used in the scheme to conduct public keys management of vehicles. Our detailed security proof and analysis indicate that our proposal can meet the security objectives of VANETs. Further, to demonstrate the feasibility of the scheme, we also implement it in the Ethereum test network (i.e., Rinkeby). Significantly, the performance analysis demonstrates that our proposal achieves a better performance than other relevant representative schemes.