A Privacy Preserving Hybrid Blockchain Based Announcement Scheme for Vehicular Energy Network

The vehicular announcement is an essential component of the Intelligent Transport System that enables vehicles to share important road information to reduce road congestion, traffic incidents, and environmental pollution. Due to the multiple security issues like single point of failure, data tampering, and false information dissemination, many researchers have proposed Blockchain (BC) based solutions to ensure data correctness and transparency in the vehicular networks. However, these schemes suffer from high computational cost and storage overhead due to the use of unsuitable BC on the vehicular layer, costly authentication schemes, and inefficient digital signature verification methods. Moreover, the privacy leakage can occur due to publicly available reputation values and lack of pseudonyms update mechanism. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving hybrid BC based vehicular announcement scheme to enable secure and efficient announcement dissemination. We use IOTA Tangle to enable the benefits of BC on vehicular layer while reducing the storage and computational cost. We employ Elliptic Curve Cryptography based pseudonym update mechanism for hiding the real identities of vehicles. To prevent false information dissemination in the network, we propose a reputation-based incentive mechanism for encouraging the users to provide honest ratings about the announcement messages. Furthermore, we use Cuckoo Filter to enable lightweight trustworthiness verification of the vehicles without revealing their reputation values. We also employ a batch verification mechanism to reduce the delays caused by digital signature verification. Moreover, we use InterPlanetary File System, and Ethereum BC for ensuring data availability and secure trust management. Finally, we evaluate the performance of our proposed scheme to prove its efficiency.