Secure Data Sharing in Internet of Vehicles Based on Blockchain and Attribute-Based Encryption

Sharing data among vehicles is one of the most important ways to provide safety-related and value-added services to connected vehicles. Nevertheless, access to the shared data must be controlled to prevent the exposure of users' privacy and data leakage or corruption. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) can provide data confidentiality and fine-grained access control. However, the complex and dynamic driving environment of vehicles may cause the attributes of vehicles to change frequently, and thus put a huge burden on the attribute management of the system or degrade the security of the system. In this paper, we propose a secure data sharing method by using ABE and blockchain for Internet of Vehicles. By using ABE, the data owner can stipulate the policy of the data access control based on the attributes of vehicles. The trusted authority is replaced by blockchain, which reduces the burden and solved the problem of single point failure of the trusted authority and increases the transparency of the whole system. An adaptive attribute revocation method is used to balance the revocation time and system cost. Moreover, the shared data are stored in a distributed Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) to improve the efficiency and security of the data sharing system. The test results show that the proposed method can well satisfy the performance requirement of secure data sharing for Internet of Vehicles.