Efficient blockchain-based group key distribution for secure authentication in VANETs

This paper proposes a group key distribution scheme using smart contract-based blockchain technology. The smart contract’s functions allow for securely distributing the group session key, following the initial legitimacy detection using public key infrastructure-based authentication. For message authentication, we propose a lightweight symmetric key cryptography-based group signature method, supporting the security and privacy requirements of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Our discussion examined the scheme’s robustness against typical adversarial attacks. To evaluate the gas costs associated with smart contract’s functions, we implemented it on the Ethereum main network. Finally, comprehensive analyses of computation and communication costs demonstrate the scheme’s effectiveness

SECMACE: Scalable and Robust Identity and Credential Management Infrastructure in Vehicular Communication Systems

Several years of academic and industrial research efforts have converged to a common understanding on fundamental security building blocks for the upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. There is a growing consensus towards deploying a special-purpose identity and credential management infrastructure, i.e., a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), enabling pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts towards that direction. In spite of the progress made by standardization bodies (IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI) and harmonization efforts (Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC)), significant questions remain unanswered towards deploying a VPKI. Deep understanding of the VPKI, a central building block of secure and privacy-preserving VC systems, is still lacking. This paper contributes to the closing of this gap. We present SECMACE, a VPKI system, which is compatible with the IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI standards specifications. We provide a detailed description of our state-of-the-art VPKI that improves upon existing proposals in terms of security and privacy protection, and efficiency. SECMACE facilitates multi-domain operations in the VC systems and enhances user privacy, notably preventing linking pseudonyms based on timing information and offering increased protection even against honest-but-curious VPKI entities. We propose multiple policies for the vehicle-VPKI interactions, based on which and two large-scale mobility trace datasets, we evaluate the full-blown implementation of SECMACE. With very little attention on the VPKI performance thus far, our results reveal that modest computing resources can support a large area of vehicles with very low delays and the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead.Comment: 14 pages, 9 figures, 10 tables, IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation System

Secure Authentication and Privacy-Preserving Techniques in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs)

In the last decade, there has been growing interest in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs). Today car manufacturers have already started to equip vehicles with sophisticated sensors that can provide many assistive features such as front collision avoidance, automatic lane tracking, partial autonomous driving, suggestive lane changing, and so on. Such technological advancements are enabling the adoption of VANETs not only to provide safer and more comfortable driving experience but also provide many other useful services to the driver as well as passengers of a vehicle. However, privacy, authentication and secure message dissemination are some of the main issues that need to be thoroughly addressed and solved for the widespread adoption/deployment of VANETs. Given the importance of these issues, researchers have spent a lot of effort in these areas over the last decade. We present an overview of the following issues that arise in VANETs: privacy, authentication, and secure message dissemination. Then we present a comprehensive review of various solutions proposed in the last 10 years which address these issues. Our survey sheds light on some open issues that need to be addressed in the future

Towards Cyber Security for Low-Carbon Transportation: Overview, Challenges and Future Directions

In recent years, low-carbon transportation has become an indispensable part as sustainable development strategies of various countries, and plays a very important responsibility in promoting low-carbon cities. However, the security of low-carbon transportation has been threatened from various ways. For example, denial of service attacks pose a great threat to the electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid networks. To minimize these threats, several methods have been proposed to defense against them. Yet, these methods are only for certain types of scenarios or attacks. Therefore, this review addresses security aspect from holistic view, provides the overview, challenges and future directions of cyber security technologies in low-carbon transportation. Firstly, based on the concept and importance of low-carbon transportation, this review positions the low-carbon transportation services. Then, with the perspective of network architecture and communication mode, this review classifies its typical attack risks. The corresponding defense technologies and relevant security suggestions are further reviewed from perspective of data security, network management security and network application security. Finally, in view of the long term development of low-carbon transportation, future research directions have been concerned.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, accepted by journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review

Blockchain-based secret key extraction for efficient and secure authentication in VANETs

Intelligent transportation systems are an emerging technology that facilitates real-time vehicle-to-everything communication. Hence, securing and authenticating data packets for intra- and inter-vehicle communication are fundamental security services in vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, public-key cryptography (PKC) is commonly used in signature-based authentication, which consumes significant computation resources and communication bandwidth for signatures generation and verification, and key distribution. Therefore, physical layer-based secret key extraction has emerged as an effective candidate for key agreement, exploiting the randomness and reciprocity features of wireless channels. However, the imperfect channel reciprocity generates discrepancies in the extracted key, and existing reconciliation algorithms suffer from significant communication costs and security issues. In this paper, PKC-based authentication is used for initial legitimacy detection and exchanging authenticated probing packets. Accordingly, we propose a blockchain-based reconciliation technique that allows the trusted third party (TTP) to publish the correction sequence of the mismatched bits through a transaction using a smart contract. The smart contract functions enable the TTP to map the transaction address to vehicle-related information and allow vehicles to obtain the transaction contents securely. The obtained shared key is then used for symmetric key cryptography (SKC)-based authentication for subsequent transmissions, saving significant computation and communication costs. The correctness and security robustness of the scheme are proved using Burrows–Abadi–Needham (BAN)-logic and Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) simulator. We also discussed the scheme’s resistance to typical attacks. The scheme’s performance in terms of packet delay and loss ratio is evaluated using the network simulator (OMNeT++). Finally, the computation analysis shows that the scheme saves ~99% of the time required to verify 1000 messages compared to existing PKC-based schemes

Protocols and Architecture for Privacy-preserving Authentication and Secure Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The rapid development in the automotive industry and wireless communication technologies have enhanced the popularity of Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Today, the automobile industry is developing sophisticated sensors that can provide a wide range of assistive features, including accident avoidance, automatic lane tracking, semi-autonomous driving, suggested lane changes, and more. VANETs can provide drivers a safer and more comfortable driving experience, as well as many other useful services by leveraging such technological advancements. Even though this networking technology enables smart and autonomous driving, it also introduces a plethora of attack vectors. However, the main issues to be sorted out and addressed for the widespread deployment/adoption of VANETs are privacy, authenticating users, and the distribution of secure messages. These issues have been addressed in this dissertation, and the contributions of this dissertation are summarized as follows: Secure and privacy-preserving authentication and message dissemination in VANETs: Attackers can compromise the messages disseminated within VANETs by tampering with the message content or sending malicious messages. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure the legitimacy of the vehicles participating in the VANETs as well as the integrity and authenticity of the messages transmitted in VANETs. In VANET communication, the vehicle uses pseudonyms instead of its real identity to protect its privacy. However, the real identity of a vehicle must be revealed when it is determined to be malicious. This dissertation presents a distributed and scalable privacy-preserving authentication and message dissemination scheme in VANET. Low overhead privacy-preserving authentication scheme in VANETs: The traditional pseudonym-based authentication scheme uses Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) to store the certificates of revoked and malicious entities in VANETs. However, the size of CRL increases significantly with the increased number of revoked entities. Therefore, the overhead involved in maintaining the revoked certificates is overwhelming in CRL-based solutions. This dissertation presents a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme that reduces the overhead associated with maintaining CRLs in VANETs. Our scheme also provides an efficient look-up operation for CRLs. Efficient management of pseudonyms for privacy-preserving authentication in VANETs: In VANETs, vehicles change pseudonyms frequently to avoid the traceability of attackers. However, if only one vehicle out of 100 vehicles changes its pseudonym, an intruder can easily breach the privacy of the vehicle by linking the old and new pseudonym. This dissertation presents an efficient method for managing pseudonyms of vehicles. In our scheme, vehicles within the same region simultaneously change their pseudonyms to reduce the chance of linking two pseudonyms to the same vehicle