A Decentralized, Secure, and Reliable Vehicle Platoon Formation With Privacy Protection for Autonomous Vehicles

Vehicle platooning enables vehicles to drive cooperatively on highways and motorways. This is to weigh numerous benefits such as lesser fuel consumption, safe drive and better road utilization. The main research focus of vehicle platoons is secure and dynamic platoon formation and ensuring privacy of vehicular data. Platoons are not safe from cyber-attacks and key is to safeguard the platoons from different known/unknown cyber threats. This paper introduces a dynamic and secure platoon formation technique targeting three different vehicle conditions on road. While the private credentials of CAVs is protected using zk-SNARK encryption protocol through permissioned Blockchain. The proposed system has been evaluated for its performance against DDoS and impersonation attack. Platoon formation time has been compared with other benchmarks and shows better results. While the performance against DDoS and impersonation attacks in comparison to the benchmarks is also improved. Since the limitation of zk-SNARK is it takes time to generate a proof and this has been also the focus of this study. The protocol has been fine tuned to adjust its parameters so that it could generate proof in less possible time.