[Paper Review] Towards Secure Blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles: Optimizing Consensus Management Using Reputation and Contract Theory

Jiawen Kang, Zehui Xiong+4 more|arXiv (Cornell University)|Sep 22, 2018

Blockchain Technology Applications and Security24 references14 citations

TL;DR

This paper proposes a two-stage soft security enhancement for blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles (BIoV) using reputation-based miner selection and contract theory-driven block verification. By leveraging multi-weight subjective logic for reputation scoring and incentive-compatible contracts, the scheme improves detection of malicious miners by 13% and reduces collusion risks, significantly enhancing consensus security and efficiency in resource-constrained IoV environments.

ABSTRACT

In Internet of Vehicles (IoV), data sharing among vehicles is essential to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. To ensure data sharing security and traceability, highefficiency Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus scheme as a hard security solution is utilized to establish blockchain-enabled IoV (BIoV). However, as miners are selected from miner candidates by stake-based voting, it is difficult to defend against voting collusion between the candidates and compromised high-stake vehicles, which introduces serious security challenges to the BIoV. To address such challenges, we propose a soft security enhancement solution including two stages: (i) miner selection and (ii) block verification. In the first stage, a reputation-based voting scheme for the blockchain is proposed to ensure secure miner selection. This scheme evaluates candidates' reputation by using both historical 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 the active miners, a newly generated block is further verified and audited by the standby miners. To incentivize the standby miners to participate in block verification, we formulate interactions between the active miners and the standby miners by using contract theory, which takes block verification security and delay into consideration. Numerical results based on a real-world dataset indicate that our schemes are secure and efficient for data sharing in BIoV.

Motivation & Objective

• Address the critical challenge of collusion attacks—particularly miner voting and block verification collusion—in blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles (BIoV) systems.
• Overcome the limitations of traditional stake-based voting in Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) by introducing a reputation-based miner selection mechanism to enhance fairness and security.
• Mitigate internal collusion among active miners during block verification by incentivizing standby miners through a contract theory-based mechanism.
• Improve the overall security and efficiency of P2P vehicle data sharing in IoV by integrating soft security measures with the hard security foundation of DPoS consensus.

Proposed method

• Employ a multi-weight subjective logic (MWSL) scheme to compute miner candidate reputation using historical interactions and third-party recommendations, ensuring robust and accurate trust assessment.
• Implement a two-stage consensus mechanism: (1) reputation-based voting selects active and standby miners from candidates, and (2) standby miners verify blocks to prevent collusion among active miners.
• Apply contract theory to model interactions between block managers (contract publishers) and miners (verifiers), designing incentive contracts that balance verification security and latency.
• Formulate individual rationality (IR) and incentive compatibility (IC) constraints in the contract model to ensure verifiers choose contracts aligned with their reputation types.
• Use real-world vehicular data to evaluate the reputation scheme’s detection rate and the contract model’s profit performance under varying numbers of verifier types.
• Optimize contract design to maximize block manager utility while ensuring high verification reliability and low delay, especially under asymmetric information conditions.

Experimental results

Research questions

• RQ1 How can reputation-based voting improve the detection rate of malicious miner candidates in a blockchain-enabled IoV system compared to traditional stake-based voting?
• RQ2 To what extent can standby miners enhance block verification security when active miners collude internally?
• RQ3 How does the contract theory-based incentive mechanism improve the participation and reliability of standby miners in block verification?
• RQ4 What is the impact of asymmetric information on the performance of the contract-based verification model compared to symmetric information settings?
• RQ5 How does the number of verifier types affect the block manager’s profit and the overall security of the consensus process?

Key findings

• The proposed multi-weight subjective logic (MWSL) scheme achieves a 13% higher correct block verification probability than the TSL scheme when the reputation threshold is set at 0.2, significantly reducing the risk of internal collusion.
• The MWSL scheme improves the detection rate of malicious miner candidates compared to traditional reputation schemes, enabling earlier and more accurate identification of compromised entities.
• The contract-based verification mechanism ensures that verifiers of all reputation types select contracts designed for their type, satisfying both individual rationality (IR) and incentive compatibility (IC) constraints.
• The block manager’s profit under the proposed contract model outperforms that of the Stackelberg game model, especially in asymmetric information settings, due to better extraction of surplus from high-reputation verifiers.
• The contract model with symmetric information yields higher profit than the asymmetric version, as the block manager can strategically set contract terms knowing the verifiers’ behavior.
• Numerical results based on real-world data confirm that the proposed scheme enhances both security and efficiency in BIoV, particularly in mitigating collusion attacks during consensus.