Toward Secure Blockchain-Enabled Internet of Vehicles: Optimizing Consensus Management Using Reputation and Contract Theory

TLDR

In the Internet of Vehicles, data sharing is essential for safety and services, yet delegated proof‑of‑stake consensus is vulnerable to voting collusion among high‑stake vehicles. This work proposes a two‑stage soft‑security scheme that first selects miners and then verifies blocks to mitigate collusion. The first stage employs a reputation‑based voting system that evaluates candidates through past interactions and peer recommendations, while the second stage uses contract theory to incentivize standby miners to audit blocks, balancing security and delay. Simulation on a real‑world dataset demonstrates that the scheme enhances both the security and efficiency of data sharing in blockchain‑enabled IoV.

Abstract

In the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), data sharing among vehicles is critical for improving driving safety and enhancing vehicular services. To ensure security and traceability of data sharing, existing studies utilize efficient delegated proof-of-stake consensus scheme as hard security solutions to establish blockchain-enabled IoV (BIoV). However, as the miners are selected from miner candidates by stake-based voting, defending against voting collusion between the candidates and compromised high-stake vehicles becomes challenging. To address the challenge, in this paper, we propose a two-stage soft security enhancement solution: 1) miner selection and 2) block verification. In the first stage, we design a reputation-based voting scheme to ensure secure miner selection. This scheme evaluates candidates' reputation using both past interactions and recommended opinions from other vehicles. The candidates with high reputation are selected to be active miners and standby miners. In the second stage, to prevent internal collusion among active miners, a newly generated block is further verified and audited by standby miners. To incentivize the participation of the standby miners in block verification, we adopt the contract theory to model the interactions between active miners and standby miners, where block verification security and delay are taken into consideration. Numerical results based on a real-world dataset confirm the security and efficiency of our schemes for data sharing in BIoV.