Asymmetric Consortium Blockchain and Homomorphically Polynomial-Based PIR for Secured Smart Parking Systems

In crowded cities, searching for the availability of parking lots is a herculean task as it results in the wastage of drivers’ time, increases air pollution, and traffic congestion. Smart parking systems facilitate the drivers to determine the information about the parking lot in real time and book them depending on the requirement. But the existing smart parking systems necessitate the drivers to reveal their sensitive information that includes their mobile number, personal identity, and desired destination. This disclosure of sensitive information makes the existing centralized smart parking systems more vulnerable to service providers’ security breaches, single points of failure, and bottlenecks. In this paper, an Improved Asymmetric Consortium Blockchain and Homomorphically Computing Univariate Polynomial-based private information retrieval (IACB-HCUPPIR) scheme is proposed to ensure parking lots’ availability with transparency security in a privacy-preserving smart parking system. In specific, an improved Asymmetric Consortium Blockchain is used for achieving secure transactions between different parties interacting in the smart parking environment. It further adopted the method of Homomorphically Computing Univariate Polynomial-based private information retrieval (HCUPPIR) scheme for preserving the location privacy of drivers. The results of IACB-HCUPPIR confirmed better results in terms of minimized computation and communication overload with throughput, latency, and response time with maximized drivers’ privacy preservation. Moreover, the proposed fully homomorphic algorithm (FHE) was compared against partial-homomorphic encryption (PHE) and technique without encryption and found that the proposed model has quick communication in allocating the parking slots starting with 24.3 s, whereas PHE starts allocating from 24.7 s and the technique without encryption starts at 27.4 s. Thus, we ensure the proposed model performs well in allocating parking slots with less time and high security with privacy preservation.