State-of-the-art authentication and verification schemes in VANETs:A survey

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), a subset of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs), are wireless networks formed around moving vehicles, enabling communication between vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and servers. With the rise of autonomous and connected vehicles, security concerns surrounding VANETs have grown. VANETs still face challenges related to privacy with full-scale deployment due to a lack of user trust. Critical factors shaping VANETs include their dynamic topology and high mobility characteristics. Authentication protocols emerge as the cornerstone of enabling the secure transmission of entities within a VANET. Despite concerted efforts, there remains a need to incorporate verification approaches for refining authentication protocols. Formal verification constitutes a mathematical approach enabling developers to validate protocols and rectify design errors with precision. Therefore, this review focuses on authentication protocols as a pivotal element for securing entity transmission within VANETs. It presents a comparative analysis of existing protocols, identifies research gaps, and introduces a novel framework that incorporates formal verification and threat modeling. The review considers key factors influencing security, sheds light on ongoing challenges, and emphasises the significance of user trust. The proposed framework not only enhances VANET security but also contributes to the growing field of formal verification in the automotive domain. As the outcomes of this study, several research gaps, challenges, and future research directions are identified. These insights would offer valuable guidance for researchers to establish secure authentication communication within VANETs

Formal-Guided Fuzz Testing: Targeting Security Assurance from Specification to Implementation for 5G and Beyond

Softwarization and virtualization in 5G and beyond necessitate thorough testing to ensure the security of critical infrastructure and networks, requiring the identification of vulnerabilities and unintended emergent behaviors from protocol designs to their software stack implementation. To provide an efficient and comprehensive solution, we propose a novel and first-of-its-kind approach that connects the strengths and coverage of formal and fuzzing methods to efficiently detect vulnerabilities across protocol logic and implementation stacks in a hierarchical manner. We design and implement formal verification to detect attack traces in critical protocols, which are used to guide subsequent fuzz testing and incorporate feedback from fuzz testing to broaden the scope of formal verification. This innovative approach significantly improves efficiency and enables the auto-discovery of vulnerabilities and unintended emergent behaviors from the 3GPP protocols to software stacks. Following this approach, we discover one identifier leakage model, one DoS attack model, and two eavesdrop attack models due to the absence of rudimentary MITM protection within the protocol, despite the existence of a Transport Layer Security (TLS) solution to this issue for over a decade. More remarkably, guided by the identified formal analysis and attack models, we exploit 61 vulnerabilities using fuzz testing demonstrated on srsRAN platforms. These identified vulnerabilities contribute to fortifying protocol-level assumptions and refining the search space. Compared to state-of-the-art fuzz testing, our united formal and fuzzing methodology enables auto-assurance by systematically discovering vulnerabilities. It significantly reduces computational complexity, transforming the non-practical exponential growth in computational cost into linear growth

An Efficient Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Communication Based on On-Chip-Error-Correcting Physical Unclonable Function

Security has become a main concern for the smart grid to move from research and development to industry. The concept of security has usually referred to resistance to threats by an active or passive attacker. However, since smart meters (SMs) are often placed in unprotected areas, physical security has become one of the important security goals in the smart grid. Physical unclonable functions (PUFs) have been largely utilized for ensuring physical security in recent years, though their reliability has remained a major problem to be practically used in cryptographic applications. Although fuzzy extractors have been considered as a solution to solve the reliability problem of PUFs, they put a considerable computational cost to the resource-constrained SMs. To that end, we first propose an on-chip-error-correcting (OCEC) PUF that efficiently generates stable digits for the authentication process. Afterward, we introduce a lightweight authentication protocol between the SMs and neighborhood gateway (NG) based on the proposed PUF. The provable security analysis shows that not only the proposed protocol can stand secure in the Canetti-Krawczyk (CK) adversary model but also provides additional security features. Also, the performance evaluation demonstrates the significant improvement of the proposed scheme in comparison with the state-of-the-art

SECURITY AND PRIVACY ISSUES IN MOBILE NETWORKS, DIFFICULTIES AND SOLUTIONS

Mobile communication is playing a vital role in the daily life for the last two decades; in turn its fields gained the research attention, which led to the introduction of new technologies, services and applications. These new added facilities aimed to ease the connectivity and reachability; on the other hand, many security and privacy concerns were not taken into consideration. This opened the door for the malicious activities to threaten the deployed systems and caused vulnerabilities for users, translated in the loss of valuable data and major privacy invasions. Recently, many attempts have been carried out to handle these concerns, such as improving systems’ security and implementing different privacy enhancing mechanisms. This research addresses these problems and provides a mean to preserve privacy in particular. In this research, a detailed description and analysis of the current security and privacy situation in the deployed systems is given. As a result, the existing shortages within these systems are pointed out, to be mitigated in development. Finally a privacy preserving prototype model is proposed. This research has been conducted as an extensive literature review about the most relevant references and researches in the field, using the descriptive and evaluative research methodologies. The main security models, parameters, modules and protocols are presented, also a detailed description of privacy and its related arguments, dimensions and factors is given. The findings include that mobile networks’ security along with users are vulnerable due to the weaknesses of the key exchange procedures, the difficulties that face possession, repudiation, standardization, compatibility drawbacks and lack of configurability. It also includes the need to implement new mechanisms to protect security and preserve privacy, which include public key cryptography, HIP servers, IPSec, TLS, NAT and DTLS-SRTP. Last but not least, it shows that privacy is not absolute and it has many conflicts, also privacy requires sophisticated systems, which increase the load and cost of the system.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format

Seamless connectivity architecture and methods for IoT and wearable devices

Wearable and Internet of Things (IoT) devices have the potential to improve lifestyle, personalize receiving treatments or introduce assisted living for elderly people. However, service delivery depends on maintaining and troubleshooting device connectivity to smartphones, where user engagement and technology proficiency represent a possible barrier that prevents a wider adoption, especially in the elderly and disabled population. Low-cost and low-power wearable and IoT devices face challenges when operating out of range of known home networks or pared devices. We propose an architecture and methods to provide seamless connectivity (Se-Co) between devices and wireless networks while maintaining low-power, low-cost and standards compatibility. Through Se-Co, the devices connect without user interaction both in home and in unknown roaming networks while maintaining anonymity, privacy and security. Roaming networks approve data limited connectivity to unknown devices that are able to provide a valid anonymized certificate of compliance and no harm through a home provider. Se-Co enables shifting data processing, such as pattern processing using artificial intelligence, from a wearable device or smartphone towards the cloud. The proposed Se-Co architecture could provide solutions to increase usability of wearable devices and improve their wider adoption, while keeping low the costs of devices, development and services

Identity, location and query privacy for smart devices

In this thesis, we have discussed three important aspects of users\u27 privacy namely, location privacy, identity privacy and query privacy. The information related to identity, location and query is very sensitive as it can reveal behavior patterns, interests, preferences and habits of the users. We have proposed several techniques in the thesis on how to better protect the identity, location and query privacy

Lightweight identity based online/offline signature scheme for wireless sensor networks

Data security is one of the issues during data exchange between two sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSN). While information flows across naturally exposed communication channels, cybercriminals may access sensitive information. Multiple traditional reliable encryption methods like RSA encryption-decryption and Diffie–Hellman key exchange face a crisis of computational resources due to limited storage, low computational ability, and insufficient power in lightweight WSNs. The complexity of these security mechanisms reduces the network lifespan, and an online/offline strategy is one way to overcome this problem. This study proposed an improved identity-based online/offline signature scheme using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) encryption. The lightweight calculations were conducted during the online phase, and in the offline phase, the encryption, point multiplication, and other heavy measures were pre-processed using powerful devices. The proposed scheme uniquely combined the Inverse Collusion Attack Algorithm (CAA) with lightweight ECC to generate secure identitybased signatures. The suggested scheme was analyzed for security and success probability under Random Oracle Model (ROM). The analysis concluded that the generated signatures were immune to even the worst Chosen Message Attack. The most important, resource-effective, and extensively used on-demand function was the verification of the signatures. The low-cost verification algorithm of the scheme saved a significant number of valued resources and increased the overall network’s lifespan. The results for encryption/decryption time, computation difficulty, and key generation time for various data sizes showed the proposed solution was ideal for lightweight devices as it accelerated data transmission speed and consumed the least resources. The hybrid method obtained an average of 66.77% less time consumption and up to 12% lower computational cost than previous schemes like the dynamic IDB-ECC two-factor authentication key exchange protocol, lightweight IBE scheme (IDB-Lite), and Korean certification-based signature standard using the ECC. The proposed scheme had a smaller key size and signature size of 160 bits. Overall, the energy consumption was also reduced to 0.53 mJ for 1312 bits of offline storage. The hybrid framework of identity-based signatures, online/offline phases, ECC, CAA, and low-cost algorithms enhances overall performance by having less complexity, time, and memory consumption. Thus, the proposed hybrid scheme is ideally suited for a lightweight WSN