Balancing Reliability, Privacy, and Accountability: A Decentralized Approach to Safety Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

In vehicular ad hoc network, the dissemination of safety messages enables vehicles to broadcast critical environmental information to nearby nodes, facilitating early warnings of potentially hazardous situations. While ensuring data reliability is fundamental to vehicular safety, it often conflicts with the requirement to preserve user privacy. Moreover, the system must support accountability to identify and trace malicious or malfunctioning vehicles when misbehavior arises. To address these conflicting security objectives of reliability, privacy, and accountability this study proposes a blockchain-based secure data dissemination scheme tailored for smart transportation. Leveraging the inherent decentralization and immutability of blockchain, the proposed scheme effectively balances these security goals within a unified framework. Through rigorous analysis and simulation-based evaluation, the scheme is shown to achieve strong security guarantees, high performance efficiency, and resilience against adversarial threats, demonstrating its practicality for real-world deployment.