Frontiers in Blockchain for Secure Information Sharing in Next Generation Transportation Systems

Incorporating connected mobility data into decision-making brings about significant data security and privacy challenges in next generation transportation systems. The problem becomes worse when the raw traffic data stream contains commuters' sensitive information that could be extracted by successful attackers. The challenges of data security and privacy must be addressed in order to create a secure information sharing environment for next generation transportation systems. Blockchain technology, which provides a tamper-resistant journal of state transition events, becomes an ideal candidate for realizing the goals of creating secure information sharing frameworks. However, existing blockchain technology and deployments also have their limitations, especially in data privacy. Because the saved data on the blockchain ledger can not be altered, we do not want to make sensitive information publicly available or record false information permanently without an authentication protocol. Innovations are needed to overcome barriers in blockchain technology for enabling secure and privacy-preserving information sharing in next generation transportation systems. This Ph.D. dissertation introduces three main innovations: (1) a zero-knowledge and Byzantine fault tolerant consensus that brings privacy-preserving to the blockchain consensus level for verifying and processing transactions, Chapter 2; (2) novel privacy-preserving authentication schemes for blockchain networks based on zero-knowledge proofs to increase security and safety in traffic management, autonomous truck fleets and ridesharing, Chapters 3, 4 and 5; and (3) blockchain-inspired architecture designs with access control policies that protect huge amounts of traffic and users' data and log access events into blockchain for traceability and accountability, Chapters 4 and 5.