Trustworthy Announcement Dissemination Scheme With Blockchain-Assisted Vehicular Cloud

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging technology that can significantly improve the efficiency of transportation systems and mitigate traffic accidents by exchanging traffic-related messages or announcements. Nevertheless, there has not been a consensus on how to generate, distribute, and validate trustworthy announcements in such an untrusted wireless environment. Security and privacy, inspiration mechanism, and resource integration are significant challenges for announcement generation and dissemination. In this paper, a secure and trustworthy announcement dissemination scheme is realized for location-based service (LBS) application in VANET. A blockchain-assisted vehicular cloud (VC) architecture is proposed to harvest underutilized heterogeneous resources of vehicles participating in VANET. Moreover, the technologies of blockchain and smart contract are adopted to classify vehicles into different levels automatically by bidding for bonuses. What's more, vehicles can generate trustworthy announcements with the help of neighbor vehicles by adopting the technology of threshold signature. Meanwhile, the reputation of announcements is evaluated for trust management. Formal security analysis shows that the proposed scheme satisfies fundamental security and privacy requirements in VANET. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme is robust and efficient.