Efficient and Reliable Information Sharing for Internet of Vehicles Using Trust and Blockchain

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) era, connected vehicles are leveraging intelligent sensors to share sensitive and real-time information to enhance road safety, driving comfort, and traffic efficiency. Despite these advancements and benefits, security and privacy vulnerabilities remain a crucial challenge. This article proposes an enhanced trust-enabled Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS) consensus-based consortium blockchain to address these challenges effectively for information sharing. The proposed consensus approach focuses on miner selection based on trust scores derived from vehicle transaction history analyses. The trust score calculation employs entropy information and binomial distribution, where the entropy measures the uncertainty in a vehicle's behavior, and the binomial distribution assesses the success rate of its transactions. This model ensures traceable and anonymous vehicle-to-vehicle information sharing, preventing unauthorized information transfer and improving overall system reliability. By leveraging the enhanced trust-based DPoS consensus mechanism of consortium blockchains, the proposed scheme leads to overcoming the challenges of vehicular ad hoc networks, along with fostering economic interest through enhanced traffic safety and energy conservation. The experimental results validate the proposed model, revealing significant improvements in terms of detection of malicious vehicles, communication latency, security, and efficiency of IoV applications.