Achieving Privacy-Preserving and Verifiable Data Sharing in Vehicular Fog With Blockchain

Vehicular sensing is advocated to perform data collection by exploiting a plethora of vehicular on-board sensors; meanwhile, with the merging of vehicular sensing and fog computing, the deployed road side units (RSUs) can act as fog nodes to collect and share vehicular sensory data at the network edge. However, there are still several problems in terms of the secure and reliable sharing of sensory data in vehicular fog. To resolve these issues, in this paper, we present an efficient, privacy-preserving and verifiable sensory data collection and sharing scheme with a permissioned blockchain in vehicular fog. During the data collection phase, by combining the homomorphic 2-DNF (Disjunctive Normal Form) cryptosystem and an identity-based signcryption scheme, our proposed scheme achieves the secure and verifiable computation of the average and variance of the collected vehicular sensory data. Meanwhile, to achieve efficient and reliable data sharing, we exploit a permissioned blockchain to maintain an immutable and tamper-proof record of the derived sensory data. Security analysis demonstrates the security properties of the proposed scheme, in terms of location privacy preservation, verifiability and immutability. Performance evaluations are conducted to validate the efficiency of the proposed scheme, i.e., improvements in computation and communication efficiency in comparison with a scheme without exploiting blockchain.

Automated summary

Vehicular sensing, combined with fog computing, allows for efficient and secure data collection and sharing at the network edge. Leveraging a permissioned blockchain ensures privacy protection and verifiability in the sharing of sensory data. Performance evaluations demonstrate improvements in efficiency compared to traditional schemes without blockchain integration.