Block4Forensic: An Integrated Lightweight Blockchain Framework for Forensics Applications of Connected Vehicles

Today's vehicles are becoming cyber-physical systems that not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them. These developments help create smart and connected (e.g., self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies, and maintenance service providers for various applications. One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is forensic analysis of traffic accidents. The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrumental in post-accident scenarios to discover the faulty party, particularly for self-driving vehicles. With the opportunity of being able to access various information in cars, we propose a permissioned blockchain framework among the various elements involved to manage the collected vehicle-related data. Specifically, we first integrate vehicular public key infrastructure (VPKI) to the proposed blockchain to provide membership establishment and privacy. Next, we design a fragmented ledger that will store detailed data related to vehicles such as maintenance information/ history, car diagnosis reports, and so on. The proposed forensic framework enables trustless, traceable, and privacy-aware post-accident analysis with minimal storage and processing overhead.

Introduction

Today's vehicles are becoming much smarter with special-purpose sensors, control units, and wireless adapters to monitor their operations and communicate with their surroundings [1]. These contemporary smart vehicles are now considered as a comprehensive cyber-physical system (CPS) with communication, control, and sensing components [2]. For instance, electronic control units (ECUs) and onboard units (OBUs) can receive data from various onboard sensing devices to take certain actions. The connections among the control units and sensor devices are made via different types of networks, including a controller area network (CAN) bus, a local interconnect network (LIN) bus, FlexRay, Bluetooth, and so on. Such developments along with capabilities to sense and communicate with the surroundings are enabling further developments such as the creation of autonomous vehicles, also known as self-driving cars, which will revolutionize our lives.