Blockchain and AI-assisted Onion Routing Protocol for Strengthening Anonymity in Beyond 5G IoMVs Networks

This paper overcomes the security and privacy issues of the Internet of military vehicles (IoMVs), wherein the attackers intercept and manipulate the IoMV communication to disrupt military operations. Moreover, IoMV communication uses the public Internet to route their sensitive data, which is open to several network-related attacks, such as data injection, session hijacking, privilege escalation, etc. To overcome the aforesaid security and privacy concerns, we proposed a blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted onion routing framework to strengthen the security and anonymity of IoMVs participating in military operations. AI algorithms are amended to classify the malicious and non-malicious IoMVs so that only non-malicious IoMVs can participate in the data exchange via the onion routing network. In addition, each IoMV is uniquely identified by two identifiers, i.e., tag and verifying token, which is stored in the block of a blockchain. These identifiers authenticate and validate the participating IoMVs. Based on that, non-malicious IoMVs can participate in the onion routing network to securely transmit sensitive data. Further, each entity of the proposed frame-work utilized the indispensable characteristics of a 6G network to minimize the data loss and validated using the packet drop ratio parameter. Lastly, the proposed framework is evaluated using different evaluation metrics, such as statistical measures and blockchain processing time.