ATHENA : a pagerank-based scheme to solve the thundering herd in authentication

Vehicles in intelligent transport systems (ITS) react to an emergency situation by broadcasting critical messages like Decentralized Environmental Notification Messages (DENMs). A digital signature is attached to each message to secure the integrity of communication, and this message is inoperative until the authentication completes. This creates a challenge for vehicles to verify massive messages in some scenarios where it could incur the thundering herd in authentication, if there is a critical situation happening in heavy road traffic. To address this problem, we propose ATHENA, a pagerank-based scheme to solve the thundering herd in ITS authentication that utilises the transmission of messages and pagerank algorithm to rank the broadcasting vehicles. Simulation results show the efficiency of ATHENA and the effectiveness of performance enhancements compared with others

SECURITY, PRIVACY AND APPLICATIONS IN VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORKS

With wireless vehicular communications, Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) enable numerous applications to enhance traffic safety, traffic efficiency, and driving experience. However, VANETs also impose severe security and privacy challenges which need to be thoroughly investigated. In this dissertation, we enhance the security, privacy, and applications of VANETs, by 1) designing application-driven security and privacy solutions for VANETs, and 2) designing appealing VANET applications with proper security and privacy assurance. First, the security and privacy challenges of VANETs with most application significance are identified and thoroughly investigated. With both theoretical novelty and realistic considerations, these security and privacy schemes are especially appealing to VANETs. Specifically, multi-hop communications in VANETs suffer from packet dropping, packet tampering, and communication failures which have not been satisfyingly tackled in literature. Thus, a lightweight reliable and faithful data packet relaying framework (LEAPER) is proposed to ensure reliable and trustworthy multi-hop communications by enhancing the cooperation of neighboring nodes. Message verification, including both content and signature verification, generally is computation-extensive and incurs severe scalability issues to each node. The resource-aware message verification (RAMV) scheme is proposed to ensure resource-aware, secure, and application-friendly message verification in VANETs. On the other hand, to make VANETs acceptable to the privacy-sensitive users, the identity and location privacy of each node should be properly protected. To this end, a joint privacy and reputation assurance (JPRA) scheme is proposed to synergistically support privacy protection and reputation management by reconciling their inherent conflicting requirements. Besides, the privacy implications of short-time certificates are thoroughly investigated in a short-time certificates-based privacy protection (STCP2) scheme, to make privacy protection in VANETs feasible with short-time certificates. Secondly, three novel solutions, namely VANET-based ambient ad dissemination (VAAD), general-purpose automatic survey (GPAS), and VehicleView, are proposed to support the appealing value-added applications based on VANETs. These solutions all follow practical application models, and an incentive-centered architecture is proposed for each solution to balance the conflicting requirements of the involved entities. Besides, the critical security and privacy challenges of these applications are investigated and addressed with novel solutions. Thus, with proper security and privacy assurance, these solutions show great application significance and economic potentials to VANETs. Thus, by enhancing the security, privacy, and applications of VANETs, this dissertation fills the gap between the existing theoretic research and the realistic implementation of VANETs, facilitating the realistic deployment of VANETs

Secure and Authenticated Message Dissemination in Vehicular ad hoc Networks and an Incentive-Based Architecture for Vehicular Cloud

Vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs) allow vehicles to form a self-organized network. VANETs are likely to be widely deployed in the future, given the interest shown by industry in self-driving cars and satisfying their customers various interests. Problems related to Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) such as routing, security, etc.have been extensively studied. Even though VANETs are special type of MANETs, solutions proposed for MANETs cannot be directly applied to VANETs because all problems related to MANETs have been studied for small networks. Moreover, in MANETs, nodes can move randomly. On the other hand, movement of nodes in VANETs are constrained to roads and the number of nodes in VANETs is large and covers typically large area. The following are the contributions of the thesis. Secure, authenticated, privacy preserving message dissemination in VANETs: When vehicles in VANET observe phenomena such as accidents, icy road condition, etc., they need to disseminate this information to vehicles in appropriate areas so the drivers of those vehicles can take appropriate action. When such messages are disseminated, the authenticity of the vehicles disseminating such messages should be verified while at the same time the anonymity of the vehicles should be preserved. Moreover, to punish the vehicles spreading malicious messages, authorities should be able to trace such messages to their senders when necessary. For this, we present an efficient protocol for the dissemination of authenticated messages. Incentive-based architecture for vehicular cloud: Due to the advantages such as exibility and availability, interest in cloud computing has gained lot of attention in recent years. Allowing vehicles in VANETs to store the collected information in the cloud would facilitate other vehicles to retrieve this information when they need. In this thesis, we present a secure incentive-based architecture for vehicular cloud. Our architecture allows vehicles to collect and store information in the cloud; it also provides a mechanism for rewarding vehicles that contributing to the cloud. Privacy preserving message dissemination in VANETs: Sometimes, it is sufficient to ensure the anonymity of the vehicles disseminating messages in VANETs. We present a privacy preserving message dissemination protocol for VANETs

Fixed Cluster Based Cluster Head Selection Algorithm in Vehicular Adhoc Network

The emergence of Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) is expected support variety of applications for driver assistance, traffic efficiency and road safety. For proper transmission of messages in VANET, one of the proposed solutions is dividing the network into clusters and then selecting a cluster head (CH) in each cluster. This can decrease the communication overhead between road side units (RSUs) and other components of VANETs, because instead of every node communicating with RSU, only CH communicates with RSU and relays relevant messages. In clustering, an important step is the selection of CH. In this thesis, we implemented vehicle to vehicle (V2V), cluster head to road side unit and road side unit to trusted authority authentication for the clustered network. We also presented a heuristic algorithm for selecting a suitable vehicle as the cluster head in a cluster. For the selection of head vehicle, we used weighted fitness values based on three parameters; trust value, position from the cluster boundary and absolute relative average speed. Simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can lead to improvements in terms of QoS metrics like delay, throughput and packet delivery ratio

VANET SECURITY FRAMEWORK FOR LOW LATENCY SAFETY APPLICATIONS

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) is a communication network for vehicles on the road. The concept of VANET is to create communication between vehicles, such as one vehicle is able to inform another vehicle about the road conditions. Communication is possible by vehicle to vehicle (V2V) and vehicle to road side unit (V2R). Presently, VANET technology is surrounded with security challenges and it is essentially important for VANET to successfully implement a security measure according to the safety applications requirements. Many researchers have proposed a number of solutions to counter security attacks and also to improve certain aspects of security i.e. authentication, privacy, and non-repudiation. The current most suitable security scheme for VANET is an Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA) asymmetric security mechanism. ECDSA is small in key size but it provides the same level of security as the large key sized scheme. However ECDSA is associated with high computational cost, thus lacking applicability in life-critical safety messaging. Due to that reason, alternative security schemes have been proposed, such as symmetric methods which provide faster communication, but at the expense of reduced security. Hence, hybrid and hardware based solutions have been proposed by researchers to mitigate the issue. However, these solutions still do not satisfy the existing safety applications standard or have larger message size due to increased message drop ratio. In this thesis, a security framework is presented; one that uses both standard asymmetric PKI and symmetric cryptography for faster and secured safety message exchange. The proposed framework is expected to improve the security mechanism in VANET by developing trust relationship among the neighboring nodes, hence forming trusted groups. The trust is established via Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and group communication. In this study, the proposed framework methods are simulated using two propagation models, i.e. two ray ground model and Nakagami model for VANET environment (802.11p). In this simulation, two traffic scenarios such as highway and urban are established. The outcome of both simulation scenarios is analyzed to identify the performance of the proposed methods in terms of latency (End-to-End Delay and Processing Delay). Also, the proposed V2V protocol for a framework is validated using a software in order to establish trust among vehicles

A comprehensive survey of V2X cybersecurity mechanisms and future research paths

Recent advancements in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication have notably improved existing transport systems by enabling increased connectivity and driving autonomy levels. The remarkable benefits of V2X connectivity come inadvertently with challenges which involve security vulnerabilities and breaches. Addressing security concerns is essential for seamless and safe operation of mission-critical V2X use cases. This paper surveys current literature on V2X security and provides a systematic and comprehensive review of the most relevant security enhancements to date. An in-depth classification of V2X attacks is first performed according to key security and privacy requirements. Our methodology resumes with a taxonomy of security mechanisms based on their proactive/reactive defensive approach, which helps identify strengths and limitations of state-of-the-art countermeasures for V2X attacks. In addition, this paper delves into the potential of emerging security approaches leveraging artificial intelligence tools to meet security objectives. Promising data-driven solutions tailored to tackle security, privacy and trust issues are thoroughly discussed along with new threat vectors introduced inevitably by these enablers. The lessons learned from the detailed review of existing works are also compiled and highlighted. We conclude this survey with a structured synthesis of open challenges and future research directions to foster contributions in this prominent field.This work is supported by the H2020-INSPIRE-5Gplus project (under Grant agreement No. 871808), the ”Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformacion Digital” and the European Union-NextGenerationEU in the frameworks of the ”Plan de Recuperación, Transformación y Resiliencia” and of the ”Mecanismo de Recuperación y Resiliencia” under references TSI-063000-2021-39/40/41, and the CHIST-ERA-17-BDSI-003 FIREMAN project funded by the Spanish National Foundation (Grant PCI2019-103780).Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Secure multi-constrained QoS reliable routing algorithm for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs)

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonVehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are a particular form of wireless network made by vehicles communicating among themselves and with roadside base stations. A wide range of services has been developed for VANETs ranging from safety to infotainment applications. A key requirement for such services is that they are offered with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in terms of service reliability and availability. Furthermore, due to the openness of VANET’s wireless channels to both internal and external attacks, the application of security mechanisms is mandatory to protect the offered QoS guarantees. QoS routing plays an essential role in identifying routes that meet the QoS requirements of the offered service over VANETs. However, searching for feasible routes subject to multiple QoS constraints is in general an NP-hard problem. Moreover, routing reliability needs to be given special attention as communication links frequently break in VANETs. To date, most existing QoS routing algorithms are designed for stable networks without considering the security of the routing process. Therefore, they are not suitable for applications in VANETs. In this thesis, the above issues are addressed firstly by developing a link reliability model based on the topological and mathematical properties of vehicular movements and velocities. Evolving graph theory is then utilised to model the VANET communication graph and integrate the developed link reliability model into it. Based on the resulting extended evolving graph model, the most reliable route in the network is picked. Secondly, the situational awareness model is applied to the developed reliable routing process because picking the most reliable route does not guarantee reliable transmission. Therefore, a situation-aware reliable multipath routing algorithm for VANETs is proposed. Thirdly, the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) technique is employed to propose an Ant-based multi-constrained QoS (AMCQ) routing algorithm for VANETs. AMCQ is designed to give significant advantages to the implementation of security mechanisms that are intended to protect the QoS routing process. Finally, a novel set of security procedures is proposed to defend the routing process against external and internal threats. Simulation results demonstrate that high levels of QoS can be still guaranteed by AMCQ even when the security procedures are applied