Secure Trust-Based Blockchain Architecture to Prevent Attacks in VANET

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are also known as intelligent transportation systems. VANET ensures timely and accurate communications between vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to infrastructure (V2I) to improve road safety and enhance the efficiency of traffic flow. Due to its open wireless boundary and high mobility, VANET is vulnerable to malicious nodes that could gain access into the network and carry out serious medium access control (MAC) layer threats, such as denial of service (DoS) attacks, data modification attacks, impersonation attacks, Sybil attacks, and replay attacks. This could affect the network security and privacy, causing harm to the information exchange within the network by genuine nodes and increase fatal impacts on the road. Therefore, a novel secure trust-based architecture that utilizes blockchain technology has been proposed to increase security and privacy to mitigate the aforementioned MAC layer attacks. A series of experiment has been conducted using the Veins simulation tool to assess the performance of the proposed solution in the terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), end-to-end delay, packet loss, transmission overhead, and computational cost.