An Effective Data Sharing Scheme Based on Blockchain in Vehicular Social Networks

Vehicular social networks (VSNs) are the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) that integrate social networks. Compared with traditional VANETs, VSNs are more suitable to serve a group of vehicles with common interests. In VSNs, vehicles can upload the necessary data in the cloud service provider (CSP) and other vehicles can query the data they are interested in through CSP, which enables VSNs to provide more user-friendly services. However, due to the wireless network communication environment, the data sent by the vehicle can easily be monitored. Adversaries are able to violate the privacy of the vehicle based on the collected data, thereby threatening the security of the entire network. In addition, if a vehicle shares malicious or false data with other vehicles, it is easy to mislead drivers and even cause serious traffic accidents. This paper proposes an effective data sharing scheme based on blockchain in VSNs. By integrating an identity based signature mechanism and pseudonym generation mechanism, we first propose an anonymous authentication mechanism as the basis for establishing trust relationships before data transmission between entities in VSNs. Then, a data sharing scheme based on blockchain is described, in which the signature mechanism and the consensus mechanism guarantee the security and traceability of data. The result of the performance analysis and the simulation experiment indicate that VAB can achieve a favourable performance compared with existing schemes.