A privacy-preserving trust management system based on blockchain for vehicular networks

Blockchain-based trust management has attracted great attention for vehicular networks due to its decentralized, transparent, and tamper-proof natures. However, the highly dynamic vehicular environment challenges the reliability of trust evaluation as well as the privacy preservation of vehicles against tracking attacks. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving trust management system to evaluate the trustworthiness of vehicles by exploiting the recent advanced blockchain techniques. Specifically, we build up a trust evaluation blockchain, where the trustworthiness of an involved vehicle is evaluated by distributed road-side units (RSUs) based on the rating feedback from neighboring vehicles. To enable efficient and privacy-preserving trust evaluation, we deploy the feedback messages aggregation and trust evaluation on two smart contracts, which are executed and verified by distributed RSUs automatically. In particular, identity authentication based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) cryptosystem is introduced to prevent privacy leakage of vehicles. Security analysis and performance evaluation reveal that our system is secure and efficient to manage the trust evaluation while guaranteeing privacy-preservation for vehicular networks