A Framework for Decentralized, Real-Time Reputation Aggregation in IoV

Abstract

With the rapid increase in the number of connected and autonomous vehicles, there is a growing concern about the potential road accidents and collisions caused by malicious vehicles. A reputation system can help to mitigate these concerns and allow users to have safe journeys by providing a way to identify and estimate the behaviour of individual vehicles and to take appropriate actions in case of any malicious behaviour. Centralised reputation systems are widely used for reputation aggregation, but this setup requires Peer trust and could be a single point of attack. The alternative to a centralised system is the decentralised reputation system for IoV, in which the reputation information is collected and maintained by the vehicles rather than a central authority. There are several key considerations when designing a secure reputation aggregation system for the IoV. These include: i) It should ensure that vehicle feedback about other vehicles is kept private; ii) vehicles' interaction networks and positions should be protected; and iii) computations should be decentralised and not resource-intensive. Adopting a decentralised reputation system within IoV using blockchain can enhance security and privacy and mitigate many security concerns. In this article, we proposed a blockchain-based reputation system which ensures the privacy of participants and provides secure and resilient reputation computation. The reputation value reflects the aggregate trustworthiness of vehicles and this is computed via feedback provided by the vehicles in a decentralized way. We analysed the security and privacy of the proposed system and provided the computation and communication performance.