Securing Connected Vehicle Applications with an Efficient Dual Cyber-Physical Blockchain Framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces a dual cyber-physical blockchain framework that enhances security and trust in connected vehicle applications by combining blockchain technology with vehicle sensing, effectively defending against various cyber-attacks.

Contribution

It presents a novel dual cyber-physical blockchain framework that integrates physical sensing with blockchain to secure large-scale vehicular networks efficiently.

Findings

Effective defense against spoofing, bad mouthing, and Sybil attacks.

Low resource overhead in computation, communication, and storage.

Demonstrated timing efficiency in large-scale simulations.

Abstract

While connected vehicle (CV) applications have the potential to revolutionize traditional transportation system, cyber and physical attacks on them could be devastating. In this work, we propose an efficient dual cyber-physical blockchain framework to build trust and secure communication for CV applications. Our approach incorporates blockchain technology and physical sensing capabilities of vehicles to quickly react to attacks in a large-scale vehicular network, with low resource overhead. We explore the application of our framework to three CV applications, i.e., highway merging, intelligent intersection management, and traffic network with route choices. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our blockchain-based framework in defending against spoofing attacks, bad mouthing attacks, and Sybil and voting attacks. We also provide analysis to demonstrate the timing efficiency of our framework and the low computation, communication, and storage overhead for its implementation.