BATS: A Blockchain-based Authentication and Trust Management System in Vehicular Networks

As the backbone of the connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) enable a variety of applications for sharing traffic information and road safety messages. However, the possibility of malicious activity in such an untrusted environment necessitates evaluating the credibility of sent messages by vehicles. In this article, we put forward a blockchain-based authentication and trust management system for vehicular networks. This architecture incorporates multiple local blockchains for enabling distributed V2X communication and a global trust score blockchain for evaluating the credibility of sent messages from vehicles as illustrated in the teaser figure. To empower our proposed architecture, we propose a novel Dual Consensus Method (DCM) consisted of local consensus for event blockchains and global consensus for the trust score blockchain. DCM enables real-time and concurrent operation of different blockchains in our architecture. We employ Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) consensus method for the global consensus. For the local consensus, we propose a new consensus method named Restricted Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (RPBFT). Through our design, a vehicle's information for decision-making about an event is not limited to the neighboring vehicles and RSUs. It has access to both recent data regarding an event and vehicles' trust scores in a fully decentralized and private fashion. Performance evaluation of our proposed method reveals its capability to calculate and store trust sores via secure, decentralized, and real-time operation.