Anonymous TollPass: A Blockchain-Based Privacy-Preserving Electronic Toll Payment Model

As big data,Artificial Intelligence,and Vehicle-to-Everything(V2X)communication have advanced,Intelligent Transportation Systems(ITS)are being developed to enable efficient and safe transportation systems.Electronic Toll Collection(ETC),which is one of the services included in ITS systems,is an automated system that allows vehicles to pass through toll plazas without stopping for manual payment.The ETC system is widely deployed on highways due to its contribution to stabilizing the overall traffic system flow.To ensure secure and efficient toll payments,designing a distributed model for sharing toll payment information among untrusted toll service providers is necessary.However,the current ETC system operates under a centralized model.Additionally,both toll service providers and toll plazas know the toll usage history of vehicles.It raises concerns about revealing the entire driving routes and patterns of vehicles.To address these issues,blockchain technology,suitable for secure data management and data sharing in distributed systems,is being applied to the ETC system.Blockchain enables efficient and transparent management of ETC information.Nevertheless,the public nature of blockchain poses a challenge where users’usage records are exposed to all participants.To tackle this,we propose a blockchain-based toll ticket model named AnonymousTollPass that considers the privacy of vehicles.The proposed model utilizes traceable ring signatures to provide unlinkability between tickets used by a vehicle and prevent the identity of the vehicle using the ticket from being identified among the ring members for the ticket.Furthermore,malicious vehicles’identities can be traced when they attempt to reuse tickets.By conducting simulations,we show the effectiveness of the proposed model and demonstrate that gas fees required for executing the proposed smart contracts are only 10%(when the ring size is 50)of the fees required in previous studies.

Efficient Remote Identification for Drone Swarms

With the advancement of unmanned aerial vehicle(UAV)technology,the market for drones and the cooperation of many drones are expanding.Drone swarms move together in multiple regions to perform their tasks.A Ground Control Server(GCS)located in each region identifies drone swarmmembers to prevent unauthorized drones from trespassing.Studies on drone identification have been actively conducted,but existing studies did not consider multiple drone identification environments.Thus,developing a secure and effective identification mechanism for drone swarms is necessary.We suggested a novel approach for the remote identification of drone swarms.For an efficient identification process between the drone swarm and the GCS,each Reader drone in the region collects the identification information of the drone swarmand submits it to the GCS for verification.The proposed identification protocol reduces the verification time for a drone swarm by utilizing batch verification to verify numerous drones in a drone swarmsimultaneously.To prove the security and correctness of the proposed protocol,we conducted a formal security verification using ProVerif,an automatic cryptographic protocol verifier.We also implemented a non-flying drone swarmprototype usingmultiple Raspberry Pis to evaluate the proposed protocol’s computational overhead and effectiveness.We showed simulation results regarding various drone simulation scenarios.

Green tea polyphenols ameliorate non-alcoholic fatty liver disease through upregulating AMPK activation in high fat fed Zucker fatty rats

AIM To investigate protective effects and molecular mechanisms of green tea polyphenols(GTP) on nonalcoholic fatty liver disease(NAFLD) in Zucker fatty(ZF) rats.METHODS Male ZF rats were fed a high-fat diet(HFD) for 2 wk then treated with GTP(200 mg/kg) or saline(5 m L/kg) for 8 wk, with Zucker lean rat as their control. At the end of experiment, serum and liver tissue were collected for measurement of metabolic parameters, alanine aminotransferase(ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase(AST), inflammatory cytokines and hepatic triglyceride and liver histology. Immunoblotting was used to detect phosphorylation of AMP-activated protein kinase(AMPK) acetyl-Co A carboxylase(ACC), and sterol regulatory element-binding protein 1c(SREBP1c). RESULTS Genetically obese ZF rats on a HFD presented with metabolic features of hepatic pathological changes comparable to human with NAFLD. GTP intervention decreased weight gain(10.1%, P = 0.052) and significantly lowered visceral fat(31.0%, P < 0.01). Compared with ZF-controls, GTP treatment significantly reduced fasting serum insulin, glucose and lipids levels. Reduction in serum ALT and AST levels(both P < 0.01) were observed in GTP-treated ZF rats. GTP treatment also attenuated the elevated TNFα and IL-6 in the circulation. The increased hepatic TG accumulation and cytoplasmic lipid droplet were attenuated by GTP treatment, associated with significantly increased expression of AMPK-Thr172(P < 0.05) and phosphorylated ACC and SREBP1c(both P < 0.05), indicating diminished hepatic lipogenesis and triglycerides out flux from liver in GTP treated rats. CONCLUSION The protective effects of GTP against HFD-induced NAFLD in genetically obese ZF rats are positively correlated to reduction in hepatic lipogenesis through upregulating the AMPK pathway.