Blockchain-Based Privacy Preservation Using Steganography in Drone-Enabled VANETs

Drone-enabled vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is a promising solution for safe driving as it improves traffic efficiency and reliability by timely sharing road events and traffic information. However, there is an urgent need to tackle security, privacy, and computational delay related issues. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based privacy preservation scheme using steganography to overcome the aforementioned issues in drone-enabled VANETs. The proposed scheme is based on a decentralized key management mechanism that combines lightweight authentication and key agreement. Data redundancy is avoided with the help of interplanetary file system (IPFS) which stores traffic event related data in blockchain through the smart contract. We further modified consensus algorithm using the practical byzantine fault tolerates algorithm and steganography to achieve better efficiency. Moreover, trust management is achieved by combining blockchain, IPFS, and steganography, which also enables the distributed storage and quick access to data for drone-enabled VANETs. We evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme in terms of response time, and computational time against incentive-based scheme.