Decentralised and Dynamic Reputation Management Model For Smart Mobility Using A Smart Contract

Abstract

The advancement in smart mobility communication technology enables intelligent vehicles to interconnect and communicate with each other, improving traffic safety and efficiency. However, the highly dynamic nature of the smart mobility network and vehicle behaviour creates the requirement for effective authentication systems to establish secure and reliable communication between vehicles. The implementation of a reputation system has been proposed to establish trust among untrusted vehicles, where the reliability of a propagated message is assessed based on the reputation of the sender vehicle. Thus, it prevents malicious vehicles from potentially broadcasting misleading messages that can cause accidents or disrupt the network. This paper proposes a novel decentralised and dynamic reputation management and computation model based on a consortium blockchain and a multi-signature smart contract. The implementation of blockchain and a smart contract provides a secure and transparent framework for registering vehicles, submitting events, voting feedback, evaluating reputation, and blocking malicious vehicles. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model, we conducted security and performance analyses. The results show how our model can provide resistance against various system and reputation manipulation attacks, such as data tampering, message forging, self-promotion, vote duplication, bad-mouth, on-off, time-dependent, and collusion attacks. Additionally, the smart contract performance illustrates execution time within a millisecond or less, which demonstrates the practicality of our design for the smart mobility applications.