A hierarchical blockchain-enabled security-threat assessment architecture for IoV

In Internet of Vehicles (IoV), the security-threat information of various traffic elements can be exploited by hackers to attack vehicles, resulting in accidents, privacy leakage. Consequently, it is necessary to establish security-threat assessment architectures to evaluate risks of traffic elements by managing and sharing security-threat information. Unfortunately, most assessment architectures process data in a centralized manner, causing delays in query services. To address this issue, in this paper, a Hierarchical Blockchain-enabled Security threat Assessment Architecture (HBSAA) is proposed, utilizing edge chains and global chains to share data. In addition, data virtualization technology is introduced to manage multi-source heterogeneous data, and a metadata association model based on attribute graph is designed to deal with complex data relationships. In order to provide high-speed query service, the ant colony optimization of key nodes is designed, and the HBSAA prototype is also developed and the performance is tested. Experimental results on the large-scale vulnerabilities data gathered from NVD demonstrate that the HBSAA not only shields data heterogeneity, but also reduces service response time.