Securing Emission Data of Smart Vehicles with Blockchain and Self-Sovereign Identities

Modern Internet of Things (IoT) networks including vehicle networks face an increased demand for security and access control with respect to privacy for sensitive data. Data manipulation and tampering of emissions values due to the economic incentives and environmental and health issues require a tamper-proof solution with the use of blockchain (BC) where the integrity of data is ensured. In this paper, we propose the integration of a public permissioned Self-Sovereign Identities (SSI) framework with a permissioned consortium BC based architecture. This innovatively supports the decentralization of the authentication and authorization processes to overcome the single point of failure problems and the use of SSI to assign identities to IoT devices. Additionally, it gives full control to the holders for their identities, whether they are humans, organizations or smart vehicles. With the practice of advanced zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) cryptographic techniques, the exposure of sensitive and private information is minimized to the absolute necessary and gains in performance and scalability are achieved. Furthermore, the way this ecosystem of technologies is combined guarantees a trusted environment for enabling and automating vehicles’ emissions certification according to emissions standards and regulations. Detailed descriptions of the processes required to integrate Hyperledger Indy (HLI) SSIs to authenticate and authorize entities on a Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) network are being quoted.