Blockchain-Enabled Cybersecurity, Privacy, and Trust for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are rapidly evolving from conventional road traffic management into highly connected, data-intensive, and increasingly autonomous mobility ecosystems. This transformation is being driven by intelligent connected vehicles, V2X communications, roadside and cloud infrastructure, cooperative perception, and the emergence of low-altitude intelligent networks supporting drones and advanced air mobility. At the same time, transportation is becoming a more integrated system in which ground, low-altitude, and digital infrastructures must interact securely and efficiently. However, this trend also exposes major challenges in identity authentication, trusted data sharing, privacy protection, cross-domain interoperability, and cyber resilience. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies offer promising capabilities for tamper-resistant data management, decentralized trust, auditable coordination, and programmable governance, making them increasingly relevant to next-generation transportation systems. This Research Topic aims to advance the theory, methods, architectures, and applications of blockchain-enabled security and trust mechanisms for next-generation transportation systems. It seeks to bring together researchers from transportation engineering, vehicular networking, communications, cybersecurity, distributed systems, and intelligent mobility to explore how blockchain can support secure, privacy-preserving, and trustworthy cooperation across heterogeneous transportation actors and infrastructures. Particular attention is given to intelligent connected transportation, V2X ecosystems, low-altitude intelligent networking, unmanned traffic management, and integrated air-ground mobility systems. The Topic encourages contributions that address both fundamental and practical questions, including decentralized identity and credential management, trusted data exchange, smart-contract-enabled coordination, traceability of autonomous operations, cross-domain interoperability, and cyber-physical resilience. Contributions combining blockchain with AI, edge computing, federated learning, digital twins, and other emerging digital technologies are especially welcome, as they align well with the journal’s interest in theoretical, computational, experimental, and application-oriented blockchain research. This Research Topic welcomes high-quality submissions that explore blockchain-enabled security, privacy, trust, and governance for next-generation transportation systems, in line with the application-oriented and interdisciplinary scope of Frontiers in Blockchain. Authors are encouraged to submit work that demonstrates strong methodological rigor, practical relevance, and clear contributions to intelligent connected transportation, emerging mobility ecosystems, and cross-domain digital infrastructure. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to: - blockchain architectures for Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) - security, authentication, and access control in V2X and vehicular networks - privacy-preserving data sharing for connected and automated mobility - decentralized identity, credential management, and trust frameworks - blockchain-enabled coordination for intelligent connected vehicles and cooperative transportation - secure information sharing and governance in low-altitude intelligent networks and unmanned traffic systems - blockchain applications in integrated air-ground mobility and comprehensive three-dimensional transportation systems - blockchain combined with digital twins for transportation monitoring, auditing, simulation, and system assurance - blockchain with AI, edge computing, cloud platforms, and federated learning for intelligent mobility - cyber-physical resilience, anomaly detection, and traceability in autonomous transportation systems - cross-domain interoperability across road, air, and low-altitude transportation infrastructures - scalable, lightweight, and low-latency blockchain solutions for real-time transportation applications - case studies, field deployments, and practical frameworks for secure and trusted mobility ecosystems Topic editors: Wei Dai, Qianyu Liu, Tianlin Li Source: https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/80775/blockchain-enabled-cybersecurity-privacy-and-trust-for-intelligent-transportation-systems