TrafficChain: A Blockchain-Based Secure and Privacy-Preserving Traffic Map

Abstract

Intelligent Connected Vehicles (ICVs) can provide smart, safe, and efficient transportation services and have attracted intensive attention recently. Obtaining timely and accurate traffic information is one of the most important problems in transportation systems, which would allow people to select fast routes and avoid congestions, thus saving their travel time on the road. Currently, the most popular ways to obtain traffic information is to inquire navigation agents, e.g., Apple map, and Google map. However, these navigation agents are essentially centralized systems, which are vulnerable to service congestions, a single point of failure, and attacks. Furthermore, users' privacy gets compromised as the agents can know their home and work addresses and hence their identities, track them in real-time, etc. In this paper, we propose TrafficChain, a secure and privacy-preserving decentralized traffic information collection system on the blockchain, by taking advantage of fog/edge computing infrastructure. In particular, we employ a two-layer blockchain architecture in TrafficChain to improve system efficiency, design a privacy-preserving scheme to protect users' identities and travel traces, and devise LSTM based deep learning mechanisms that can defend against Byzantine attacks and Sybil attacks in our system. Furthermore, an incentive mechanism is designed to motivate users to participate in the system. Simulation results show that TrafficChain works very efficiently and is resilient to both Byzantine attacks and Sybil attacks.

Keywords

• Blockchain
• intelligent connected vehicles (ICVs)
• fog/edge computing
• Byzantine attacks
• Sybil attacks
• LSTM