Conventional over-the-air (OTA) firmware update systems perform per-vehicle encryption and rely on a central server for both encrypted firmware delivery and key distribution. This architecture is vulnerable to network condition variations, leading...
Conventional over-the-air (OTA) firmware update systems perform per-vehicle encryption and rely on a central server for both encrypted firmware delivery and key distribution. This architecture is vulnerable to network condition variations, leading to scalability limitations and single points of failure. Consequently, it poses considerable challenges to security, scalability, and reliability in large-scale vehicular environments. To address these issues, this study adopts an Access control vector broadcast group key management (ACV-BGKM) based group key management scheme to distribute keys and disseminate firmware in a distributed environment using blockchain and the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). This approach enables efficient and stable firmware distribution for a large number of vehicles. Furthermore, to overcome the computational complexity of ACV-BGKM, we introduce a novel matrix partitioning technique that enables efficient computation and management of firmware encryption keys, even in large scale vehicular networks. In addition, a role-based access control (RBAC) mechanism is applied to smart contracts to ensure that only authorized users can register firmware and related information on the blockchain, thereby preventing malicious data registration. Unlike existing blockchain based OTA approaches that primarily use blockchain for data integrity verification, the proposed framework leverages blockchain for active participation in firmware distribution, realizing a fully decentralized update architecture. This constitutes a key distinguishing feature of this work. Through simulation based evaluations, we demonstrate that the proposed approach serves as an effective solution for secure and efficient OTA firmware updates in large-scale vehicular networks.