The drastically increasing volume and the growing trend on the types of data have brought in the possibility of realizing advanced applications such as enhanced driving safety, and have enriched existing vehicular services through data sharing among vehicles and data analysis. Due to limited resource of vehicles, mobile edge computing integrated with vehicular networks gives rise to Vehicular Edge COmputing and Networks (VECONs) for providing powerful computing and massive storage resources. However, vehicular edge computing servers consisted of roadside units cannot be fully trusted, which may result in serious security and privacy challenges. We exploit consortium blockchain and smart contract technologies to achieve secure data storage and sharing in vehicular edge networks. These technologies efficiently prevent data sharing without authorization. In addition, we propose a reputation based data sharing scheme to ensure high-quality data sharing among vehicles. A three-weight subjective logic model is utilized for precisely managing reputation of the vehicles. Numerical results based on a real dataset show that our schemes achieve reasonable efficiency and high-level security for data sharing in VECONs.

In Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), Peer-to-Peer (P2P) energy trading ubiquitously takes place in various scenarios, e.g., microgrids, energy harvesting networks, and vehicle-to-grid networks. However, there are common security and privacy challenges caused by untrusted and nontransparent energy markets in these scenarios. To address the security challenges, we exploit the consortium blockchain technology to propose a secure energy trading system named energy blockchain. This energy blockchain can be widely used in general scenarios of P2P energy trading getting rid of a trusted intermediary. Besides, to reduce the transaction limitation resulted from transaction confirmation delays on the energy blockchain, we propose a credit-based payment scheme to support fast and frequent energy trading. An optimal pricing strategy using Stackelberg game for credit-based loans is also proposed. Security analysis and numerical results based on a real dataset illustrate that the proposed energy blockchain and credit-based payment scheme are secure and efficient in IIoT.

Federated learning is a newly emerged distributed machine learning paradigm, where the clients are allowed to individually train local deep neural network (DNN) models with local data and then jointly aggregate a global DNN model at the central server. Vehicular edge computing (VEC) aims at exploiting the computation and communication resources at the edge of vehicular networks. Federated learning in VEC is promising to meet the ever-increasing demands of artificial intelligence (AI) applications in intelligent connected vehicles (ICV). Considering image classification as a typical AI application in VEC, the diversity of image quality and computation capability in vehicular clients potentially affects the accuracy and efficiency of federated learning. Accordingly, we propose a selective model aggregation approach, where “fine” local DNN models are selected and sent to the central server by evaluating the local image quality and computation capability. Regarding the implementation of model selection, the central server is not aware of the image quality and computation capability in the vehicular clients, whose privacy is protected under such a federated learning framework. To overcome this information asymmetry, we employ two-dimension contract theory as a distributed framework to facilitate the interactions between the central server and vehicular clients. The formulated problem is then transformed into a tractable problem through successively relaxing and simplifying the constraints, and eventually solved by a greedy algorithm. Using two datasets, i.e., MNIST and BelgiumTSC, our selective model aggregation approach is demonstrated to outperform the original federated averaging (FedAvg) approach in terms of accuracy and efficiency. Meanwhile, our approach also achieves higher utility at the central server compared with the baseline approaches.

Vehicular edge computing (VEC) is introduced to extend computing capacity to vehicular network edge recently. With the advent of VEC, service providers directly host services in close proximity of mobile vehicles for great improvements. As a result, a new networking paradigm, vehicular edge networks is emerged along with the development of VEC. However, it is necessary to address security issues for facilitating VEC well. In this paper, we focus on reputation management to ensure security protection and improve network efficiency in the implementation of VEC. A distributed reputation management system (DREAMS) is proposed, wherein VEC servers are adopted to execute local reputation management tasks for vehicles. This system has remarkable features for improving overall performance: 1) distributed reputation maintenance; 2) trusted reputation manifestation; 3) accurate reputation update; and 4) available reputation usage. In particular, we utilize multi-weighted subjective logic for accurate reputation update in DREAMS. To enrich reputation usage in DREAMS, service providers optimize resource allocation in computation offloading by considering reputation of vehicles. Numerical results indicate that DREAMS has great advantages in optimizing misbehavior detection and improving the recognition rate of misbehaving vehicles. Meanwhile, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our reputation-based resource allocation algorithm.

As a promising branch of Internet of Things, Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is envisioned to serve as an essential data sensing and processing platform for intelligent transportation systems. In this paper, we aim to address location privacy issues in IoV. In traditional pseudonym systems, the pseudonym management is carried out by a centralized way resulting in big latency and high cost. Therefore, we present a new paradigm named Fog computing supported IoV (F-IoV) to exploit resources at the network edge for effective pseudonym management. By utilizing abundant edge resources, a privacy-preserved pseudonym (P#x00B3;) scheme is proposed in F-IoV. The pseudonym management in this scheme is shifted to specialized fogs at the network edge named pseudonym fogs, which are composed of roadside infrastructures and deployed in close proximity of vehicles. P#x00B3; scheme has following advantages: 1) context-aware pseudonym changing; 2) timely pseudonym distribution; and 3) reduced pseudonym management overhead. Moreover, a hierarchical architecture for P#x00B3; scheme is introduced in F-IoV. Enabled by the architecture, a context-aware pseudonym changing game and secure pseudonym management communication protocols are proposed. The security analysis shows that P#x00B3; scheme provides secure communication and privacy preservation for vehicles. Numerical results indicate that P#x00B3; scheme effectively enhances location privacy and reduces communication overhead for the vehicles.

Federated learning is a promising tool in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) domain for training a machine learning model in a decentralized manner. Specifically, the data owners (e.g., IoT device consumers) keep their raw data and only share their local computation results to train the global model of the model owner (e.g., an IoT service provider). When executing the federated learning task, the data owners contribute their computation and communication resources. In this situation, the data owners have to face privacy issues where attackers may infer data property or recover the raw data based on the shared information. Considering these disadvantages, the data owners will be reluctant to use their data to participate in federated learning without a well-designed incentive mechanism. In this article, we deliberately design an incentive mechanism jointly considering the task expenditure and privacy issue of federated learning. Based on a differentially private federated learning (DPFL) framework that can prevent the privacy leakage of the data owners, we model the contribution as well as the computation, communication, and privacy costs of each data owner. The three types of costs are data owners' private information unknown to the model owner, which thus forms an information asymmetry. To maximize the utility of the model owner under such information asymmetry, we leverage a 3-D contract approach to design the incentive mechanism. The simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed incentive mechanism with the DPFL framework compared to other baseline mechanisms.