Towards a Blockchain-Based SD-IoV for Applications Authentication and Trust Management

IoV, bringing smartness into the vehicular environment, represents the future of the vehicular networks. To improve the IoV network management, resource utilization and QoS, a new architecture integrating the SDN technology have been proposed: SD-IoV. However, this architecture introduces new threats and, in particular, security is an important challenge. One of the major shortcomings with security is the lack of authentication and authorization of the applications (network, third party or user) at the distributed SD-IoV control layer. Indeed, these applications are currently able to control the SDN controllers and therefore the network behavior without any restriction. Consequently, a malicious or compromised application could easily disturb the entire network. That is why this paper proposes an innovative trust establishment system based on the blockchain technology. This system aims to control the application identity, as well as the application behavior and the network resources allocation and management. The ideas of application identity and application trust index, using the distributed nature of the SD-IoV, are introduced. Moreover, a design of this system, using smart contracts is also presented.