Blockchain enabled vehicle NFT and key management for IoV networks in fog computing environment

In the internet of vehicles networks (IoV-N), vehicles exchange messages to improve traffic efficiency using fog and edge computing. Vehicles may make decisions based on exchanged messages in IoV-N. Therefore, security and key management in the IoV-N are the primary concerns. In this paper, key management for social IoV-N using blockchain is presented. This work also utilises non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to store and secure records such as keys, issuer identities, etc. on behalf of trusted static authorities such as the city-level transport authority (CTA). The paper also introduced bilinear pairing for key generation and secure exchange in the IoV-N. CTA makes up the key generation process at the fog layer to reduce latency, and the blockchain is stored in a data server at the cloud layer. Extensive simulation and results show that key management for social IoV-N is a secure, fast, and viable solution.