Proof of accumulated trust: A new consensus protocol for the security of the IoV

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a distributed network that enables vehicles to connect to each other and to various infrastructure and smart devices, in order to exchange data and provide important services. The highly dynamic environment of the IoV offers a lot of opportunities but at the same time makes the network susceptible to a large number of security attacks. In this paper, we propose a framework that comprises a private blockchain model to secure the transactions that are generated by vehicles. Our model makes use of our proposed Proof of Accumulated Trust (PoAT) mechanism that selects specific RSUs to become blockchain miners based on their accumulated trust. In addition, the proposed system introduces a smart redundancy method in which each vehicle and RSU sends a transaction to multiple destinations, in order to avoid the situation when one or more IoV nodes are compromised. We conduct extensive experiments in which we compare our system to two recent blockchain-based security frameworks for the IoV. The simulation results illustrate the superiority of our system in terms of attack detection rate, blockchain generation time, and network overhead traffic.