Secure and Flexible Data Sharing With Dual Privacy Protection in Vehicular Digital Twin Networks

Vehicular digital twin networks (VDTNs) offer great opportunities for driver safety enhancements. By leveraging digital twin (DT) technology, VDTNs can collect and analyze traffic data to optimize driving routes, and allow the out-of-field vehicles to share traffic data via their DTs. However, the real-time data sharing process over a public channel raises concerns about security and privacy. Existing data sharing schemes cannot be directly adopted for VDTNs because they rarely consider dual (data and identity) privacy, synchronization, and flexibility, while also imposing a significant cost on resource-limited entities. To address these challenges, we propose a secure and flexible data sharing scheme with dual privacy protection for VDTNs. In the proposed scheme, a signature of knowledge protocol is developed for protecting the vehicle’s real identity and ensuring authentication, smart contract algorithms are designed to assist in realizing accountability, and a verification control mechanism is devised for allowing the vehicle to flexibly share the traffic data. Additionally, DT with consistent states is capable of removing sensitive information from the shared data, which guarantees synchronization and data privacy. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is resilient against potential security threats in VDTNs. Furthermore, the performance evaluation indicates that the proposed scheme not only outperforms the state-of-the-art schemes but also achieves feasible blockchain consumption and data authentication delay.