230501

Cooperative Vehicular Platooning (Co-VP) is a paradigmatic example of a Cooperative Cyber-Physical System (Co-CPS), which holds the potential to vastly improve road safety by partially removing humans from the driving task. However, the challenges are substantial, as the domain involves several topics, such as control theory, communications, vehicle dynamics, security, and traffic engineering, that must be coupled to describe, develop and validate these systems of systems accurately. This work presents a comprehensive survey of significant and recent advances in Co-VP relevant fields. We start by overviewing the work on control strategies and underlying communication infrastructures, focusing on their interplay. We also address a fundamental concern by presenting a cyber-security overview regarding these systems. Furthermore, we present and compare the primary initiatives to test and validate those systems, including simulation tools, hardware-in-the-loop setups, and vehicular testbeds. Finally, we highlight a few open challenges in the Co-VP domain. This work aims to provide a fundamental overview of highly relevant works on Co-VP topics, particularly by exposing their inter-dependencies, facilitating a guide that will support further developments in this challenging field.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Software Protection and Secure Authentication for Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing every technology we deal with. Autonomy has been a sought-after goal in vehicles, and now more than ever we are very close to that goal. Vehicles before were dumb mechanical devices, now they are becoming smart, computerized, and connected coined as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Moreover, researchers found a way to make more use of these enormous capabilities and introduced Autonomous Vehicles Cloud Computing (AVCC). In these platforms, vehicles can lend their unused resources and sensory data to join AVCC. In this dissertation, we investigate security and privacy issues in AVCC. As background, we built our vision of a layer-based approach to thoroughly study state-of-the-art literature in the realm of AVs. Particularly, we examined some cyber-attacks and compared their promising mitigation strategies from our perspective. Then, we focused on two security issues involving AVCC: software protection and authentication. For the first problem, our concern is protecting client’s programs executed on remote AVCC resources. Such a usage scenario is susceptible to information leakage and reverse-engineering. Hence, we proposed compiler-based obfuscation techniques. What distinguishes our techniques, is that they are generic and software-based and utilize the intermediate representation, hence, they are platform agnostic, hardware independent and support different high level programming languages. Our results demonstrate that the control-flow of obfuscated code versions are more complicated making it unintelligible for timing side-channels. For the second problem, we focus on protecting AVCC from unauthorized access or intrusions, which may cause misuse or service disruptions. Therefore, we propose a strong privacy-aware authentication technique for users accessing AVCC services or vehicle sharing their resources with the AVCC. Our technique modifies robust function encryption, which protects stakeholder’s confidentiality and withstands linkability and “known-ciphertexts” attacks. Thus, we utilize an authentication server to search and match encrypted data by performing dot product operations. Additionally, we developed another lightweight technique, based on KNN algorithm, to authenticate vehicles at computationally limited charging stations using its owner’s encrypted iris data. Our security and privacy analysis proved that our schemes achieved privacy-preservation goals. Our experimental results showed that our schemes have reasonable computation and communications overheads and efficiently scalable

Visible Light Communication Cyber Security Vulnerabilities For Indoor And Outdoor Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communication

Light fidelity (Li-Fi), developed from the approach of Visible Light Communication (VLC), is a great replacement or complement to existing radio frequency-based (RF) networks. Li-Fi is expected to be deployed in various environments were, due to Wi-Fi congestion and health limitations, RF should not be used. Moreover, VLC can provide the future fifth generation (5G) wireless technology with higher data rates for device connectivity which will alleviate the traffic demand. 5G is playing a vital role in encouraging the modern applications. In 2023, the deployment of all the cellular networks will reach more than 5 billion users globally. As a result, the security and privacy of 5G wireless networks is an essential problem as those modern applications are in people\u27s life everywhere. VLC security is as one of the core physical-layer security (PLS) solutions for 5G networks. Due to the fact that light does not penetrate through solid objects or walls, VLC naturally has higher security and privacy for indoor wireless networks compared to RF networks. However, the broadcasting nature of VLC caused concerns, e.g., eavesdropping, have created serious attention as it is a crucial step to validate the success of VLC in wild. The aim of this thesis is to properly address the security issues of VLC and further enhance the VLC nature security. We analyzed the secrecy performance of a VLC model by studying the characteristics of the transmitter, receiver and the visible light channel. Moreover, we mitigated the security threats in the VLC model for the legitimate user, by 1) implementing more access points (APs) in a multiuser VLC network that are cooperated, 2) reducing the semi-angle of LED to help improve the directivity and secrecy and, 3) using the protected zone strategy around the AP where eavesdroppers are restricted. According to the model\u27s parameters, the results showed that the secrecy performance in the proposed indoor VLC model and the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) VLC outdoor model using a combination of multiple PLS techniques as beamforming, secure communication zones, and friendly jamming is enhanced. The proposed model security performance was measured with respect to the signal to noise ratio (SNR), received optical power, and bit error rate (BER) Matlab simulation results

A survey on vehicular communication for cooperative truck platooning application

Platooning is an application where a group of vehicles move one after each other in close proximity, acting jointly as a single physical system. The scope of platooning is to improve safety, reduce fuel consumption, and increase road use efficiency. Even if conceived several decades ago as a concept, based on the new progress in automation and vehicular networking platooning has attracted particular attention in the latest years and is expected to become of common implementation in the next future, at least for trucks.The platoon system is the result of a combination of multiple disciplines, from transportation, to automation, to electronics, to telecommunications. In this survey, we consider the platooning, and more specifically the platooning of trucks, from the point of view of wireless communications. Wireless communications are indeed a key element, since they allow the information to propagate within the convoy with an almost negligible delay and really making all vehicles acting as one. Scope of this paper is to present a comprehensive survey on connected vehicles for the platooning application, starting with an overview of the projects that are driving the development of this technology, followed by a brief overview of the current and upcoming vehicular networking architecture and standards, by a review of the main open issues related to wireless communications applied to platooning, and a discussion of security threats and privacy concerns. The survey will conclude with a discussion of the main areas that we consider still open and that can drive future research directions.(c) 2022 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

Securing Cyber-Physical Social Interactions on Wrist-worn Devices

Since ancient Greece, handshaking has been commonly practiced between two people as a friendly gesture to express trust and respect, or form a mutual agreement. In this article, we show that such physical contact can be used to bootstrap secure cyber contact between the smart devices worn by users. The key observation is that during handshaking, although belonged to two different users, the two hands involved in the shaking events are often rigidly connected, and therefore exhibit very similar motion patterns. We propose a novel key generation system, which harvests motion data during user handshaking from the wrist-worn smart devices such as smartwatches or fitness bands, and exploits the matching motion patterns to generate symmetric keys on both parties. The generated keys can be then used to establish a secure communication channel for exchanging data between devices. This provides a much more natural and user-friendly alternative for many applications, e.g., exchanging/sharing contact details, friending on social networks, or even making payments, since it doesn’t involve extra bespoke hardware, nor require the users to perform pre-defined gestures. We implement the proposed key generation system on off-the-shelf smartwatches, and extensive evaluation shows that it can reliably generate 128-bit symmetric keys just after around 1s of handshaking (with success rate >99%), and is resilient to different types of attacks including impersonate mimicking attacks, impersonate passive attacks, or eavesdropping attacks. Specifically, for real-time impersonate mimicking attacks, in our experiments, the Equal Error Rate (EER) is only 1.6% on average. We also show that the proposed key generation system can be extremely lightweight and is able to run in-situ on the resource-constrained smartwatches without incurring excessive resource consumption

On the Secure and Resilient Design of Connected Vehicles: Methods and Guidelines

Vehicles have come a long way from being purely mechanical systems to systems that consist of an internal network of more than 100 microcontrollers and systems that communicate with external entities, such as other vehicles, road infrastructure, the manufacturer’s cloud and external applications. This combination of resource constraints, safety-criticality, large attack surface and the fact that millions of people own and use them each day, makes securing vehicles particularly challenging as security practices and methods need to be tailored to meet these requirements.This thesis investigates how security demands should be structured to ease discussions and collaboration between the involved parties and how requirements engineering can be accelerated by introducing generic security requirements. Practitioners are also assisted in choosing appropriate techniques for securing vehicles by identifying and categorising security and resilience techniques suitable for automotive systems. Furthermore, three specific mechanisms for securing automotive systems and providing resilience are designed and evaluated. The first part focuses on cyber security requirements and the identification of suitable techniques based on three different approaches, namely (i) providing a mapping to security levels based on a review of existing security standards and recommendations; (ii) proposing a taxonomy for resilience techniques based on a literature review; and (iii) combining security and resilience techniques to protect automotive assets that have been subject to attacks. The second part presents the design and evaluation of three techniques. First, an extension for an existing freshness mechanism to protect the in-vehicle communication against replay attacks is presented and evaluated. Second, a trust model for Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication is developed with respect to cyber resilience to allow a vehicle to include trust in neighbouring vehicles in its decision-making processes. Third, a framework is presented that enables vehicle manufacturers to protect their fleet by detecting anomalies and security attacks using vehicle trust and the available data in the cloud