WEVAN: a mechanism for evidence creation and verification in VANETs

There are traffic situations (e.g. incorrect speeding tickets) in which a given vehicle’s driving behavior at some point in time has to be proved to a third party. Vehicle-mounted sensorial devices are not suitable for this matter since they can be maliciously manipulated. However, surrounding vehicles may give their vision on another one’s behavior. Furthermore, these data may be shared with the affected vehicle through VANETs. In this paper, a VANET-enabled data exchange mechanism called WEVAN is presented. The goal of this mechanism is to build and verify evidences based on surrounding vehicles (called witnesses) testimonies. Due to the short-range nature of VANETs, the connectivity to witnesses may be reduced with time – the later their testimonies are requested, the lower the amount of witnesses may be. Simulation results show that if testimonies are ordered 5 seconds later, an average of 38 testimonies may be collected in highway scenarios. Other intervals and road settings are studied as well.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion de España. Proyecto E-SAVE (TIN2009-13461)Publicad

Peer-to-Peer Secure Updates for Heterogeneous Edge Devices

We consider the problem of securely distributing software updates to large scale clusters of heterogeneous edge compute nodes. Such nodes are needed to support the Internet of Things and low-latency edge compute scenarios, but are difficult to manage and update because they exist at the edge of the network behind NATs and firewalls that limit connectivity, or because they are mobile and have intermittent network access. We present a prototype secure update architecture for these devices that uses the combination of peer-to-peer protocols and automated NAT traversal techniques. This demonstrates that edge devices can be managed in an environment subject to partial or intermittent network connectivity, where there is not necessarily direct access from a management node to the devices being updated

A Survey on Wireless Sensor Network Security

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) have recently attracted a lot of interest in the research community due their wide range of applications. Due to distributed nature of these networks and their deployment in remote areas, these networks are vulnerable to numerous security threats that can adversely affect their proper functioning. This problem is more critical if the network is deployed for some mission-critical applications such as in a tactical battlefield. Random failure of nodes is also very likely in real-life deployment scenarios. Due to resource constraints in the sensor nodes, traditional security mechanisms with large overhead of computation and communication are infeasible in WSNs. Security in sensor networks is, therefore, a particularly challenging task. This paper discusses the current state of the art in security mechanisms for WSNs. Various types of attacks are discussed and their countermeasures presented. A brief discussion on the future direction of research in WSN security is also included.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figures, 2 table