BAPPS: A Blockchain-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Sharing Scheme for Secure Data Exchange in the Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is evolving into a distributed electronic sensing and communication infrastructure in which vehicles, roadside units, and service platforms continuously exchange data for intelligent transportation services. However, cross-organization sharing of vehicle-borne sensing data can expose identity links, location traces, task routes, and raw sensor content. This paper proposes BAPPS, a Blockchain-Assisted Privacy-Preserving Sharing Scheme for Secure Data Exchange in the Internet of Vehicles. BAPPS combines anonymous identity issuance, zk-SNARK-based data-quality verification, elliptic-curve proxy re-encryption, and on-chain audit records. Data owners can prove that encrypted observations satisfy task-specific quality or access constraints without disclosing raw data, while a semi-honest service provider transforms ciphertexts only under authorization. The consortium blockchain records task publication, access verification, proof submission, and data-hash evidence, enabling traceable sharing without exposing plaintext observations. We further implement a Tendermint-style BFT consensus layer, denoted BAPPS-T, to reduce confirmation latency in the data-sharing workflow. Using the three available real Tendermint benchmark workbooks as repeated records, BAPPS-T achieved a mean consensus latency of 776.3 ms at 100 nodes (SD = 80.8 ms, n = 3, 95% CI = 575.5–977.1 ms), corresponding to a 90.17% latency reduction relative to Baseline 1. The results indicate that BAPPS can provide a reproducible protocol layer for trusted, privacy-aware sharing of mobile electronics observations under explicit deployment assumptions.