A-VIP: Anonymous Verification and Inference of Positions in Vehicular Networks

MiniconferenceInternational audienceKnowledge of the location of vehicles and tracking of the routes they follow are a requirement for a number of applications, including e-tolling and liability attribution in case of accidents. However, public disclosure of the identity and position of drivers jeopardizes user privacy, and securing the tracking through asymmetric cryptography may have an exceedingly high computational cost. Additionally, there is currently no way an authority can verify the correctness of the position information provided by a potentially misbehaving car. In this paper, we address all of the issues above by introducing A-VIP, a lightweight framework for privacy preserving and tracking of vehicles. A-VIP leverages anonymous position beacons from vehicles, and the cooperation of nearby cars collecting and reporting the beacons they hear. Such information allows an authority to verify the locations announced by vehicles, or to infer the actual ones if needed. We assess the effectiveness of A-VIP through both realistic simulation and testbed implementation results, analyzing also its resilience to adversarial attacks

Randomized Initialization of a Wireless Multihop Network

Address autoconfiguration is an important mechanism required to set the IP address of a node automatically in a wireless network. The address autoconfiguration, also known as initialization or naming, consists to give a unique identifier ranging from 1 to $n$ for a set of $n$ indistinguishable nodes. We consider a wireless network where $n$ nodes (processors) are randomly thrown in a square $X$, uniformly and independently. We assume that the network is synchronous and two nodes are able to communicate if they are within distance at most of $r$ of each other ($r$ is the transmitting/receiving range). The model of this paper concerns nodes without the collision detection ability: if two or more neighbors of a processor $u$ transmit concurrently at the same time, then $u$ would not receive either messages. We suppose also that nodes know neither the topology of the network nor the number of nodes in the network. Moreover, they start indistinguishable, anonymous and unnamed. Under this extremal scenario, we design and analyze a fully distributed protocol to achieve the initialization task for a wireless multihop network of $n$ nodes uniformly scattered in a square $X$. We show how the transmitting range of the deployed stations can affect the typical characteristics such as the degrees and the diameter of the network. By allowing the nodes to transmit at a range r= \sqrt{\frac{(1+\ell) \ln{n} \SIZE}{\pi n}} (slightly greater than the one required to have a connected network), we show how to design a randomized protocol running in expected time $O(n^{3/2} \log^2{n})$ in order to assign a unique number ranging from 1 to $n$ to each of the $n$ participating nodes

Information Spreading in Stationary Markovian Evolving Graphs

Markovian evolving graphs are dynamic-graph models where the links among a fixed set of nodes change during time according to an arbitrary Markovian rule. They are extremely general and they can well describe important dynamic-network scenarios. We study the speed of information spreading in the "stationary phase" by analyzing the completion time of the "flooding mechanism". We prove a general theorem that establishes an upper bound on flooding time in any stationary Markovian evolving graph in terms of its node-expansion properties. We apply our theorem in two natural and relevant cases of such dynamic graphs. "Geometric Markovian evolving graphs" where the Markovian behaviour is yielded by "n" mobile radio stations, with fixed transmission radius, that perform independent random walks over a square region of the plane. "Edge-Markovian evolving graphs" where the probability of existence of any edge at time "t" depends on the existence (or not) of the same edge at time "t-1". In both cases, the obtained upper bounds hold "with high probability" and they are nearly tight. In fact, they turn out to be tight for a large range of the values of the input parameters. As for geometric Markovian evolving graphs, our result represents the first analytical upper bound for flooding time on a class of concrete mobile networks.Comment: 16 page

Universe Detectors for Sybil Defense in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

The Sybil attack in unknown port networks such as wireless is not considered tractable. A wireless node is not capable of independently differentiating the universe of real nodes from the universe of arbitrary non-existent fictitious nodes created by the attacker. Similar to failure detectors, we propose to use universe detectors to help nodes determine which universe is real. In this paper, we (i) define several variants of the neighborhood discovery problem under Sybil attack (ii) propose a set of matching universe detectors (iii) demonstrate the necessity of additional topological constraints for the problems to be solvable: node density and communication range; (iv) present SAND -- an algorithm that solves these problems with the help of appropriate universe detectors, this solution demonstrates that the proposed universe detectors are the weakest detectors possible for each problem

Design and Analysis of Distributed Faulty Node Detection in Networks

Propagation of faulty data is a critical issue. In case of Delay Tolerant Networks (DTN) in particular, the rare meeting events require that nodes are efficient in propagating only correct information. For that purpose, mechanisms to rapidly identify possible faulty nodes should be developed. Distributed faulty node detection has been addressed in the literature in the context of sensor and vehicular networks, but already proposed solutions suffer from long delays in identifying and isolating nodes producing faulty data. This is unsuitable to DTNs where nodes meet only rarely. This paper proposes a fully distributed and easily implementable approach to allow each DTN node to rapidly identify whether its sensors are producing faulty data. The dynamical behavior of the proposed algorithm is approximated by some continuous-time state equations, whose equilibrium is characterized. The presence of misbehaving nodes, trying to perturb the faulty node detection process, is also taken into account. Detection and false alarm rates are estimated by comparing both theoretical and simulation results. Numerical results assess the effectiveness of the proposed solution and can be used to give guidelines for the algorithm design. PRD assigns weights to individual links as well as end-to-end delay, so as to reflect the node status in the long run of the network. Large-scale simulation results demonstrate that PRD performs better than the widely used ETX metric as well as other two metrics devised recently in terms of energy consumption and end-to-end delay, while guaranteeing packet delivery ratio.