Assignment Background
ITSEG Co., the software provider for highly integrated and ultra-simplified intelligence
system (Hypothetical company you work at as a distributed systems developer) proposed the
project. The project is to develop a trustworthy system for connected and autonomous
vehicles (Internet of Vehicles). As shown in the week 1’s lecture, Internet of Vehicles indeed
offers a lot of flexibilities (i.e., crash scenes re-routing, emergency vehicles giveaway).
However, malicious users can also generate misleading information to jeopardize the entire
system. ITSEG is looking into the blockchain technology to build the backbone for a
trustworthy internet of vehicles system. Your job is to investigate the following:
1. Background questions (put in the Background section) – 6 marks
What are the main (heterogenous) components in Internet of Vehicles?
How these components communicate with each other?
What are the attack scenarios in such distributed systems?
To achieve fault tolerance in such distributed systems, Byzantine agreement is needed. What
are some state-of-the-art Byzantine agreement protocols available for such distributed
systems? What can these protocols achieve? What are the remaining gaps?
2. General questions (put in the Preliminary section) – 5 marks
How does Blockchain work?
How does Blockchain ensure security?
How does Blockchain ensure non-repudiation?
3. Application specific questions (put in the Solution section) – 9 marks
How can Blockchain reduce or even eliminate malicious users?
What are the limitations of Blockchain when applied for Internet of Vehicles?
What are the possible solutions to solve these limitations?
For references, we recommend conferences and journals at
CORE A/A* or Q1 ranking. CORE conference ranking: http://portal.core.edu.au/confranks/, CORE journal ranking: http://portal.core.edu.au/jnl-ranks/, Journal ranking:
https://www.scimagojr.com/journalrank.php.