MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy

A Lightweight and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocol for Mobile Edge Computing

With the advent of the Internet-of-Things (IoT), vehicular networks and cyber-physical systems, the need for real-time data processing and analysis has emerged as an essential pre-requite for customers' satisfaction. In this direction, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) provides seamless services with reduced latency, enhanced mobility, and improved location awareness. Since MEC has evolved from Cloud Computing, it inherited numerous security and privacy issues from the latter. Further, decentralized architectures and diversified deployment environments used in MEC platforms also aggravate the problem; causing great concerns for the research fraternity. Thus, in this paper, we propose an efficient and lightweight mutual authentication protocol for MEC environments; based on Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC), one-way hash functions and concatenation operations. The designed protocol also leverages the advantages of discrete logarithm problems, computational Diffie-Hellman, random numbers and time-stamps to resist various attacks namely-impersonation attacks, replay attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks, etc. The paper also presents a comparative assessment of the proposed scheme relative to the current state-of-the-art schemes. The obtained results demonstrate that the proposed scheme incurs relatively less communication and computational overheads, and is appropriate to be adopted in resource constraint MEC environments.Comment: To appear in IEEE GLOBECOM 201

Exploratory study to explore the role of ICT in the process of knowledge management in an Indian business environment

In the 21st century and the emergence of a digital economy, knowledge and the knowledge base economy are rapidly growing. To effectively be able to understand the processes involved in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge management in the business environment is critical to the success of an organization. This study builds on the previous research of the authors on the enablers of knowledge management by identifying the relationship between the enablers of knowledge management and the role played by information communication technologies (ICT) and ICT infrastructure in a business setting. This paper provides the findings of a survey collected from the four major Indian cities (Chennai, Coimbatore, Madurai and Villupuram) regarding their views and opinions about the enablers of knowledge management in business setting. A total of 80 organizations participated in the study with 100 participants in each city. The results show that ICT and ICT infrastructure can play a critical role in the creating, managing and sharing of knowledge in an Indian business environment