Increasing the trust between automotive actors using a Hyperledger Fabric blockchain

Abstract: It is a well-established phenomenon that blockchain technology can be applied to reach a consensus between entities which do not trust one another. Moreover, blockchain technology also allows these trustless entities to reach an agreement on a shared ledger. Through its trustless consensus and shared ledger properties, the blockchain technology can provide trust between trustless parties. The present-day automotive industry suffers from several trust issues between the involved parties during a vehicle’s life cycle. In this thesis, it is evaluated whether a blockchain-based solution can be applied to address the trust issues between involved parties in the automotive industry. A proof of concept is implemented using Hyperledger Fabric. In order to evaluate whether the proposed solution can improve trust, in addition to the proposed solution, a centralized database approach is implemented as the baseline which is considered as the traditional solution. A comparison between the two solutions is then carried out. The evaluated aspects in the comparison are security, performance, and usefulness, where security is considered as the most vital aspect. The experiments show that the blockchain-based solution achieves a higher degree of both security and usefulness, whereas the baseline solution (i.e., the database solution) achieves better performance. The overall conclusion of our experiments implies that the blockchain-based solution is significantly more trustworthy than the traditional database implementation. The conclusion is motivated by the fact that the blockchain-based solution is superior in terms of both security and usefulness.