Towards a Blockchain-based Identity and Trust Management Framework for the IoV Ecosystem

The past decade has seen a huge growth not only in the Internet of Things (IoT) but also in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) from both academia and industry. Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) combine a variety of sensors, IoT devices, control units, gateways, etc. Therefore, the software of the different sensors and IoT devices needs to be updated to the latest version by the Software Vendors. This paper proposes a blockchain-based identity and trust management framework for the IoV ecosystem, that aims to provide secure software updates. The proposed framework consists of two processes: the identification and registration of the entities of the ecosystem, and the authentication of the entities which relies on established W3C standards for defining verifiable credential presentation, verification, and revocation. We illustrate the feasibility of our approach in a case study.