BC-MTD: Blockchain-driven Moving Target Defense for Secure Vehicle Access

Network-based vehicle access has become the norm for next-generation mobility. It enables remote monitoring and control over the vehicles, which eases user operations. Nonetheless, this feature might impose catastrophic threats such as unauthorized access, personal data theft, or vehicle hijacking. This study proposed a secure protection for vehicle access over the internet by encompassing a blockchain smart contract and moving target defense (BC-MTD). The moving target defense (MTD) ensures secure access to the vehicle using a dynamic flow matching implemented using OpenFlow SDN. On the blockchain side, a smart contract manages the secure key exchanges between the vehicle and the user. We have deployed and tested the contract on the Sepolia network. For MTD evaluation, we tested it on Mininet, and it incurs only a minuscule < 0.1 ms packet processing latency compared to standard Layer 2 packet forwarding on an OpenVSwitch test bed.