Abstract: Disclosed herein are system and methods for authenticating vehicles based on trust established within a community of vehicles using a distributed ledger associating an identifier of each vehicle with a respective public key uniquely assigned to the respective vehicle. When a vehicle requests to establish a communication session with another party, which may be another vehicle or a service system, the vehicle may transmit its identifier and a message signed using its respective private key from which its public key is derived. In response, to authenticate the vehicle, the other party may communicate with one or more trusted vehicles which may verify the vehicle is genuinely associated with the public key by decoding the message using the public key retrieved from their local copy of the distributed ledger. The other party may then establish the communication session or refuse it based on the whether the verification is successful or not.

Abstract: A method of updating Electronic Control Units (ECUs) of vehicles using updates received via Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication channels comprising receiving from nearby vehicle(s) via V2V communication channel(s), one or more of a plurality of update packages distributed for updating a plurality of ECUs deployed in a plurality of vehicles, each of the nearby vehicle(s) is within a reception area of the V2V communication channel(s), analyzing an identifier extracted from each update package to determine whether the update package is directed to ECU(s) of the vehicle, communicating via the V2V communication channel(s), in case of positive determination, with a subset of the vehicles each maintaining a local log associating each update package with a respective verification code to validate the verification code extracted from the update package according to a consensus of the subset and, in case of successful validation, initiating update of the ECU(s) using the update package(s).