Abstract
Soon we will be riding on autonomous vehicles connected and communicated locally and globally. As more and more devices are connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), security and privacy become significant concerns regarding how these devices are discovered and interacted with each other in a fully autonomous and distributed manner. One distributed denial of services (DDoS) attack, for instance, to one connected autonomous car running within a fleet network could cause remarkable loss of life and property. Conventional security and privacy approaches do not work well for IoT because of its decentralized topology and constrained computing resources on embedded devices. The decentralization and distributed nature of blockchain offers potential solutions to security and trust in IoT applications, providing improved resilience, encryption, auditing and transparency. However, the current blockchain model, as an append-only distributed ledger with a time-stamped set of transaction blocks, requires high-power computing and high bandwidth overhead and delays, which are not suitable for most IoT devices. This research aims at a simplified blockchain model and architecture that are inexpensive in computing requirements while maintaining high security and trust.