A Privacy-Preserving Data Sharing Scheme Based on Blockchain for Vehicular Edge Networks

The advancing fifth-generation technology has brought the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) more and more attention. The vast amount of data collected and generated by vehicles has enabled enhanced driving security and intelligent transportation through data sharing between vehicles and roadside infrastructures. Due to the huge data volume and vehicle resource constraints, vehicular edge networks have been proposed to provide computational and storage resources. Vehicular data commonly contains sensitive information about geographical locations and personal identifiers, making it vulnerable to attacks and leaks. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving framework for blockchain-enabled data sharing in vehicular edge networks. Attribute-based ring signatures and threshold proxy re-encryption are used to address privacy concerns, and a decentralized regulatory approach has been proposed to track illegal data transfers. We address the security and trust issues by using the consortium blockchain as a distributed ledger of correlated information records. We also implement consent-based access control for data owners, which is rarely considered in currently proposed systems. Implementation and experiments show that our scheme can handle large throughput and data sizes. The security analysis shows the promise of our scheme in ensuring security against various attacks.