A CREDIT COIN: A PRIVACY PRESERVING BLOCKCHAIN BASED INCENTIVES ANNOUNCEMENT NETWORK FOR COMMUNICATION OF SMART VEHICLES

Abstract

The vehicular announcement network is one of the most promising utilities in the
communications of smart vehicles and in the smart transportation systems. In general, there are two major issues
in building an effective vehicular announcement network. First, it is difficult to forward reliable
announcements without revealing users’ identities. Second, users usually lack the motivation to forward
announcements. In this paper, we endeavor to resolve these two issues through proposing an effective
announcement network called Credit Coin, a novel privacy-preserving incentive announcement network based
on Blockchain via an efficient anonymous vehicular announcement aggregation protocol. On the one hand,
Credit Coin allows nondeterministic different signers (i.e., users) to generate the signatures and to send
announcements anonymously in the non fully trusted environment. On the other hand, with Blockchain, Credit
Coin motivates users with incentives to share traffic information. In addition, transactions and account
information in Credit Coin are tamper-resistant. Credit Coin also achieves conditional privacy since Trace
manager in Credit Coin traces malicious users’ identities in anonymous announcements with related
transactions. Credit Coin thus is able to motivate users to forward announcements anonymously and reliably.
Extensive experimental results show that Credit Coin is efficient and practical in simulations of smart
transportation.