A novel blockchain consensus protocol with quantum private comparison for internet of vehicles

Consensus protocols are a key feature in decentralised systems/networks which aims to obtain and agree on a shared state among multiple unreliable nodes with diverse applications. Therefore, that integrated design with new technologies will become a difficult and hot research topic, especially in combining new fields such as quantum information and blockchain. Spontaneously, we propose a new consensus protocol in combination with quantum private comparison (QPC) in internet of vehicles (IoV) using practical Byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) to achieve security and efficiency at higher levels. Through multi-node collaborative computing, different vehicles can quickly reach a consensus. More importantly, we have added quantum technology in the identity authentication and consensus phase, which can make our integrated network more robust and prevent malicious attacks. In other words, our protocol adopts QPC to make it impossible for any malicious node to maliciously disturb the order between nodes in the consensus phase, thus improving security. Finally, compared with the recent related literature, our consensus protocol has strong practicability and universality and can be well applied in the IoV environment.