Advancing security in IoT-driven critical infrastructure: a focus on smart transportation system.

As new technological platforms such as the Internet of Things (IoT), blockchain, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are gradually emerging and being integrated into critical infrastructures which are subjected to digital attacks. i.e., the critical systems are vulnerable to new cybersecurity threatsand thus requires corresponding security approach to challenge the threats.It is therefore imperative to identify the various types of possible cyber-attacks on the systems and develop a security framework to manage the associated security risks. IoT-based critical infrastructure systemslike smart healthcare, smart transportation and smart manufacturing are prone to attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks, brute-force attacks, Man-in-the-Middle attacks (MiTM), Stuxnet computer virus etc. This paper focuses on a detailed study of the smart transportation system and its security issues; various threat vectors used by the attackers are examinedalongsidecorresponding countermeasures. Additionally,an in-depth analysis on how an identified malicious attack on smart transportationcould be achieved was carried out by using an open-source vehicular network tool called Vehicle in Network Simulation (Veins). A detailed evaluation of the impact of MiTM attack was then carried out based on the evaluation metrics. Results from the simulation results indicate that attacks on the built STSthesis vehicular network have a higher influence on the network. Also, although the STSthesis was a basic network that was run with considerable node, limited time and injected malicious node, the impact of the MiTM attack was still visible. Furthermore, implementing the elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) with the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) in the early stage of design and implementation will prevent the MiTM attacks from intercepting messages between legitimate nodes

Adaptive Beacon Broadcast in Opportunistic Routing for VANETs

Broadcast of beacon messages including geographic coordinates, node speeds, and directions are among the most commonly used methods in routing protocols of VANETs to obtain neighboring positions. Broadcast of periodic beacon messages in fixed time intervals will reduce network performance due to increased channel load and contention. In this paper, an adaptive update strategy for sending beacon messages according to the VANETs’ characteristics (position, speed, and direction) and the nature of broadcast wireless channel in an opportunistic routing strategy is studied. It is based on two rules: 1) an estimation of the lifetime of the links between vehicles’ beacon messages are sent after the expiration of the estimated time to inform their local topology and 2) if the forwarding set of consecutively received data packets is changed, a beacon message is sent to maintain the accuracy of the topology. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy significantly reduces the cost of routing and improves network performance in terms of packet-delivery ratios, average end-to-end delay, and routing overhead

SCALABLE MULTI-HOP DATA DISSEMINATION IN VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORKS

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) aim at improving road safety and travel comfort, by providing self-organizing environments to disseminate traffic data, without requiring fixed infrastructure or centralized administration. Since traffic data is of public interest and usually benefit a group of users rather than a specific individual, it is more appropriate to rely on broadcasting for data dissemination in VANETs. However, broadcasting under dense networks suffers from high percentage of data redundancy that wastes the limited radio channel bandwidth. Moreover, packet collisions may lead to the broadcast storm problem when large number of vehicles in the same vicinity rebroadcast nearly simultaneously. The broadcast storm problem is still challenging in the context of VANET, due to the rapid changes in the network topology, which are difficult to predict and manage. Existing solutions either do not scale well under high density scenarios, or require extra communication overhead to estimate traffic density, so as to manage data dissemination accordingly. In this dissertation, we specifically aim at providing an efficient solution for the broadcast storm problem in VANETs, in order to support different types of applications. A novel approach is developed to provide scalable broadcast without extra communication overhead, by relying on traffic regime estimation using speed data. We theoretically validate the utilization of speed instead of the density to estimate traffic flow. The results of simulating our approach under different density scenarios show its efficiency in providing scalable multi-hop data dissemination for VANETs

Impact of directional antennas on routing and neighbor discovery in wireless ad-hoc networks

Wireless ad-hoc networks are data networks that are deployed without a fixed infrastructure nor central controllers such as access points or base stations. In these networks, data packets are forwarded directly to the destination node if they are within the transmission range of the sender or sent through a multi-hop path of intermediary nodes that act as relays. This paradigm where a fixed infrastructure is not needed, is tolerant to topology changes and allows a fast deployment have been considered as a promissory technology that is suitable for a large number of network implementations, such as mobile hand-held devices, wireless sensors, disaster recovery networks, etc. Recently, smart directional antennas have been identified as a robust technology that can boost the performance of wireless ad-hoc networks in terms of coverage, connectivity, and capacity. Contrary to omnidirectional antennas, which can radiate energy in all directions, directional antennas can focus the energy in a specific direction, extending the coverage range for the same power level. Longer ranges provide shorter paths to destination nodes and also improve connectivity. Moreover, directional antennas can reduce the number of collisions in a contention-based access scheme as they can steer the main lobe in the desired direction and set nulls in all the others, thereby they minimize the co-channel interference and reduce the noise level. Connections are more reliable due to the increased link stability and spatial diversity. Shorter paths, as well as alternative paths, are also available as a consequence of the use of directional antennas. All these features combined results in a higher network capacity. Most of the previous research has focused on adapting the existing medium access control and routing protocols to utilize directional communications. This research work is novel because it improves the neighbor discovery process as it allows to discover nodes in the second neighborhood of a given node using a gossip based procedure and by sharing the relative position information obtained during this stage with the routing protocol with the aim of reducing the number of hops between source and destination. We have also developed a model to evaluate the energy consumed by the nodes when smart directional antennas are used in the ad-hoc network. This study has demonstrated that by adapting the beamwidth of the antennas nodes are able to reach furthest nodes and consequently, reduce the number of hops between source and destination. This fact not only reduces the end-to-end delay and improves the network throughput but also reduces the average energy consumed by the whole network