A Multi-User, Single-Authentication Protocol for Smart Grid Architectures

open access articleIn a smart grid system, the utility server collects data from various smart grid devices. These data play an important role in the energy distribution and balancing between the energy providers and energy consumers. However, these data are prone to tampering attacks by an attacker, while traversing from the smart grid devices to the utility servers, which may result in energy disruption or imbalance. Thus, an authentication is mandatory to efficiently authenticate the devices and the utility servers and avoid tampering attacks. To this end, a group authentication algorithm is proposed for preserving demand–response security in a smart grid. The proposed mechanism also provides a fine-grained access control feature where the utility server can only access a limited number of smart grid devices. The initial authentication between the utility server and smart grid device in a group involves a single public key operation, while the subsequent authentications with the same device or other devices in the same group do not need a public key operation. This reduces the overall computation and communication overheads and takes less time to successfully establish a secret session key, which is used to exchange sensitive information over an unsecured wireless channel. The resilience of the proposed algorithm is tested against various attacks using formal and informal security analysis

Securing fog computing with a decentralised user authentication approach based on blockchain

The use of low-cost sensors in IoT over high-cost devices has been considered less expensive. However, these low-cost sensors have their own limitations such as the accuracy, quality, and reliability of the data collected. Fog computing offers solutions to those limitations; nevertheless, owning to its intrinsic distributed architecture, it faces challenges in the form of security of fog devices, secure authentication and privacy. Blockchain technology has been utilised to offer solutions for the authentication and security challenges in fog systems. This paper proposes an authentication system that utilises the characteristics and advantages of blockchain and smart contracts to authenticate users securely. The implemented system uses the email address, username, Ethereum address, password and data from a biometric reader to register and authenticate users. Experiments showed that the proposed method is secure and achieved performance improvement when compared to existing methods. The comparison of results with state-of-the-art showed that the proposed authentication system consumed up to 30% fewer resources in transaction and execution cost; however, there was an increase of up to 30% in miner fees

Defending against Sybil Devices in Crowdsourced Mapping Services

Real-time crowdsourced maps such as Waze provide timely updates on traffic, congestion, accidents and points of interest. In this paper, we demonstrate how lack of strong location authentication allows creation of software-based {\em Sybil devices} that expose crowdsourced map systems to a variety of security and privacy attacks. Our experiments show that a single Sybil device with limited resources can cause havoc on Waze, reporting false congestion and accidents and automatically rerouting user traffic. More importantly, we describe techniques to generate Sybil devices at scale, creating armies of virtual vehicles capable of remotely tracking precise movements for large user populations while avoiding detection. We propose a new approach to defend against Sybil devices based on {\em co-location edges}, authenticated records that attest to the one-time physical co-location of a pair of devices. Over time, co-location edges combine to form large {\em proximity graphs} that attest to physical interactions between devices, allowing scalable detection of virtual vehicles. We demonstrate the efficacy of this approach using large-scale simulations, and discuss how they can be used to dramatically reduce the impact of attacks against crowdsourced mapping services.Comment: Measure and integratio

Information management and security protection for internet of vehicles

Considering the huge number of vehicles on the roads, the Internet of Vehicles is envisioned to foster a variety of new applications ranging from road safety enhancement to mobile entertainment. These new applications all face critical challenges which are how to handle a large volume of data streams of various kinds and how the secure architecture enhances the security of the Internet of Vehicles systems. This dissertation proposes a comprehensive message routing solution to provide the fundamental support of information management for the Internet of Vehicles. The proposed approach delivers messages via a self-organized moving-zone-based architecture formed using pure vehicle-to-vehicle communication and integrates moving object modeling and indexing techniques to vehicle management. It can significantly reduce the communication overhead while providing higher delivery rates. To ensure the identity and location privacy of the vehicles on the Internet of Vehicles environment, a highly efficient randomized authentication protocol, RAU+ is proposed to leverage homomorphic encryption and enable individual vehicles to easily generate a new randomized identity for each newly established communication while each authentication server would not know their real identities. In this way, not any single party can track the user. To minimize the infrastructure reliance, this dissertation further proposes a secure and lightweight identity management mechanism in which vehicles only need to contact a central authority once to obtain a global identity. Vehicles take turns serving as the captain authentication unit in self-organized groups. The local identities are computed from the vehicle's global identity and do not reveal true identities. Extensive experiments are conducted under a variety of Internet of Vehicles environments. The experimental results demonstrate the practicality, effectiveness, and efficiency of the proposed protocols.Includes bibliographical references