Blockchain-Enabled Privacy-Preserving Internet of Vehicles: Decentralized and Reputation-Based Network Architecture

With the rapid growth of the transportation systems, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has evolved as a new theme in both industry and academia from traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). However, the multi-sources and multi-domain information disseminated over the network has brought huge security issues for the communications in the IoV system. In this paper, we present a lightweight blockchainbased framework for IoV to meet the requirements of security, privacy and high availability. We propose a novel hierarchical data sharing framework where two types of sub-blockchain are formed allowing for flexible access control. In addition, we propose a reconfigured blockchain structure to acclimatize itself to the vehicular network which is composed of a number of lightweight and low-energy IoT devices. Moreover, we design a lightweight reputation-based consensus algorithm with a multi-weight reputation evaluation mechanism to prevent internal collusion of network nodes. Based on the proposed architecture, security analysis is illustrated to show the security and privacy of the proposed framework.