Block4Forensic: An Integrated Lightweight Blockchain Framework for Forensics Applications of Connected Vehicles

systems that not only communicate with other vehicles but also gather various information from hundreds of sensors within them. These developments help create smart and connected (e.g., self-driving) vehicles that will introduce significant information to drivers, manufacturers, insurance companies, and maintenance service providers for various applications. One such application that is becoming crucial with the introduction of self-driving cars is forensic analysis of traffic accidents. The utilization of vehicle-related data can be instrumental in post-accident scenarios to discover the faulty party, particularly for self-driving vehicles. With the opportunity of being able to access various information in cars, we propose a permissioned blockchain framework among the various elements involved to manage the collected vehicle-related data. Specifically, we first integrate vehicular public key infrastructure (VPKI) to the proposed blockchain to provide membership establishment and privacy. Next, we design a fragmented ledger that will store detailed data related to vehicles such as maintenance information/history, car diagnosis reports, and so on. The proposed forensic framework enables trustless, traceable, and privacy-aware post-accident analysis with minimal storage and processing overhead.