Incentivizing Secure Block Verification by Contract Theory in Blockchain-Enabled Vehicular Networks

The burgeoning vehicular networks generate a huge amount of sensing data. Data sharing among vehicles enables a number of valuable vehicular applications to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. To ensure security and traceability of data sharing, an efficient Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) consensus algorithm is utilized to establish Blockchain-Enabled VEhicular Networks (BEVENs). Miners in DPoS include active miners and standby miners. The active miners are responsible for block generation and block verification. However, due to the limited number of active miners in DPoS, the compromised active miners may collude with each other to generate maliciously manipulated results of block verification. To prevent the internal collusion among the active miners, a newly generated block can be further verified and audited by the standby miners. To incentivize the participation of the miners in block verification, we adopt the contract theory to model the interactions between active miners and standby miners, where both block verification security and delay are taken into consideration. Numerical results demonstrate the security and efficiency of our schemes for data sharing in BEVENs.