Secure and Tamper-resilient Distributed Ledger for Data Aggregation in Autonomous Vehicles

The phases those turn the wheels of an autonomous vehicle, are perception, decision and actuation. Among these, the major highlight of recent research has been perception through diverse sensors, and decision through an ever-aggressive cloud/fog/mist computing setup. In this paper, we take a closer look into the flow of data, both internal and external to the autonomous vehicle. We argue that confidentiality, integrity and availability of these data are critical to the eventual adoption of higher-level security and privacy mechanisms in autonomous vehicles. To that effect, we propose a secure and tamper-resilient distributed ledger as an underlying enabler for intra-vehicular data aggregation, and study its security and privacy issues under appropriate adversarial models, where the distributed ledger is instantiated as a standard consortium blockchain.