State-of-the-art authentication and verification schemes in VANETs:A survey

Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs), a subset of Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks (MANETs), are wireless networks formed around moving vehicles, enabling communication between vehicles, roadside infrastructure, and servers. With the rise of autonomous and connected vehicles, security concerns surrounding VANETs have grown. VANETs still face challenges related to privacy with full-scale deployment due to a lack of user trust. Critical factors shaping VANETs include their dynamic topology and high mobility characteristics. Authentication protocols emerge as the cornerstone of enabling the secure transmission of entities within a VANET. Despite concerted efforts, there remains a need to incorporate verification approaches for refining authentication protocols. Formal verification constitutes a mathematical approach enabling developers to validate protocols and rectify design errors with precision. Therefore, this review focuses on authentication protocols as a pivotal element for securing entity transmission within VANETs. It presents a comparative analysis of existing protocols, identifies research gaps, and introduces a novel framework that incorporates formal verification and threat modeling. The review considers key factors influencing security, sheds light on ongoing challenges, and emphasises the significance of user trust. The proposed framework not only enhances VANET security but also contributes to the growing field of formal verification in the automotive domain. As the outcomes of this study, several research gaps, challenges, and future research directions are identified. These insights would offer valuable guidance for researchers to establish secure authentication communication within VANETs

Detection of Sybil attack in vehicular ad hoc networks by analyzing network performance

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an emerging technology which can be very helpful for providing safety and security as well as for intelligent transportation services. But due to wireless communication of vehicles and high mobility it has certain security issues which cost the safety and security of people on the road. One of the major security concerns is the Sybil attack in which the attacker creates dummy identities to gain high influence in the network that causes delay in some services and fake voting in the network to misguide others. The early detection of this attack can prevent people from being misguided by the attacker and save them from getting into any kind of trap. In this research paper, Sybil attack is detected by first applying the Poisson distribution algorithm to predict the traffic on the road and in the second approach, analysis of the network performance for packet delivery ratio (PDR) is performed in malign and benign environment. The simulation result shows that PDR decreases in presence of fake vehicles in the network. Our approach is simple and effective as it does not require high computational overhead and also does not violate the privacy issues of people in the network

Proof of Travel for Trust-Based Data Validation in V2I Communication Part I: Methodology

Previous work on misbehavior detection and trust management for Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication can identify falsified and malicious messages, enabling witness vehicles to report observations about high-criticality traffic events. However, there may not exist enough "benign" vehicles with V2X connectivity or vehicle owners who are willing to opt-in in the early stages of connected-vehicle deployment. In this paper, we propose a security protocol for the communication between vehicles and infrastructure, titled Proof-of-Travel (POT), to answer the research question: How can we transform the power of cryptography techniques embedded within the protocol into social and economic mechanisms to simultaneously incentivize Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) data sharing activities and validate the data? The key idea is to determine the reputation of and the contribution made by a vehicle based on its distance traveled and the information it shared through V2I channels. In particular, the total vehicle miles traveled for a vehicle must be testified by digital signatures signed by each infrastructure component along the path of its movement. While building a chain of proofs of spatial movement creates burdens for malicious vehicles, acquiring proofs does not result in extra cost for normal vehicles, which naturally want to move from the origin to the destination. The proof of travel for a vehicle can then be used to determine the contribution and reward by its altruistic behaviors. We propose short-term and long-term incentive designs based on the POT protocol and evaluate their security and performance through theoretical analysis and simulations

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

UAVouch : a distributed drone identity and location validation mechanism

As aplicações emergentes de vigilância, com equipes de VANTs, dependem de comunicação segura para trocar informações, coordenar seus movimentos e cumprir os objetivos da missão. Proteger a rede identificando o acesso de nós mal-intencionados tentando perturbar o sistema é uma tarefa importante, e particularmente sensível no domínio militar. Observando essa necessidade, este artigo apresenta o design e a avaliação do UAVouch: Um esquema distribuído de validação de localização e identidade de drones que combina uma autenticação baseada em chave pública com uma verificação de plausibilidade de movimento para grupos de VANTs. A ideia principal do UAVouch complementa o mecanismo de autenticação, verificando periodicamente a plausibilidade da localização dos VANTs vizinhos, permitindo a detecção de intrusos que não conseguem seguir as trajetórias esperadas. A solução proposta foi avaliada em simulação através de um cenário de vigilância militar, no qual detectou-se ataques de falsificação de posição de nós mal-intencionados com precisão em média acima de 85%.Emerging surveillance applications of UAV teams rely on secure communication to exchange information, coordinate their movements, and fulfill mission objectives. Protecting the network by identifying malicious nodes access trying to disturb the system is an important task, which is particularly sensitive in the military domain. Observing this need, this paper presents the design and evaluation of UAVouch: an identity and location validation scheme combining a public-key based authentication with a movement plausibility check for groups of UAVs. The key idea of UAVouch supplement the authentication mechanism by periodically checking the plausibility of the location of neighboring UAVs, allowing the detection of intruders that are unable to follow expected trajectories. The proposed solution was evaluated in a simulated military surveillance scenario in which it detects malicious nodes’ position falsification attacks with an accuracy on average above 85%

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

Attacks on self-driving cars and their countermeasures : a survey

Intelligent Traffic Systems (ITS) are currently evolving in the form of a cooperative ITS or connected vehicles. Both forms use the data communications between Vehicle-To-Vehicle (V2V), Vehicle-To-Infrastructure (V2I/I2V) and other on-road entities, and are accelerating the adoption of self-driving cars. The development of cyber-physical systems containing advanced sensors, sub-systems, and smart driving assistance applications over the past decade is equipping unmanned aerial and road vehicles with autonomous decision-making capabilities. The level of autonomy depends upon the make-up and degree of sensor sophistication and the vehicle's operational applications. As a result, self-driving cars are being compromised perceived as a serious threat. Therefore, analyzing the threats and attacks on self-driving cars and ITSs, and their corresponding countermeasures to reduce those threats and attacks are needed. For this reason, some survey papers compiling potential attacks on VANETs, ITSs and self-driving cars, and their detection mechanisms are available in the current literature. However, up to our knowledge, they have not covered the real attacks already happened in self-driving cars. To bridge this research gap, in this paper, we analyze the attacks that already targeted self-driving cars and extensively present potential cyber-Attacks and their impacts on those cars along with their vulnerabilities. For recently reported attacks, we describe the possible mitigation strategies taken by the manufacturers and governments. This survey includes recent works on how a self-driving car can ensure resilient operation even under ongoing cyber-Attack. We also provide further research directions to improve the security issues associated with self-driving cars. © 2013 IEEE

MobileTrust: Secure Knowledge Integration in VANETs

Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) are becoming popular due to the emergence of the Internet of Things and ambient intelligence applications. In such networks, secure resource sharing functionality is accomplished by incorporating trust schemes. Current solutions adopt peer-to-peer technologies that can cover the large operational area. However, these systems fail to capture some inherent properties of VANETs, such as fast and ephemeral interaction, making robust trust evaluation of crowdsourcing challenging. In this article, we propose MobileTrust—a hybrid trust-based system for secure resource sharing in VANETs. The proposal is a breakthrough in centralized trust computing that utilizes cloud and upcoming 5G technologies to provide robust trust establishment with global scalability. The ad hoc communication is energy-efficient and protects the system against threats that are not countered by the current settings. To evaluate its performance and effectiveness, MobileTrust is modelled in the SUMO simulator and tested on the traffic features of the small-size German city of Eichstatt. Similar schemes are implemented in the same platform to provide a fair comparison. Moreover, MobileTrust is deployed on a typical embedded system platform and applied on a real smart car installation for monitoring traffic and road-state parameters of an urban application. The proposed system is developed under the EU-founded THREAT-ARREST project, to provide security, privacy, and trust in an intelligent and energy-aware transportation scenario, bringing closer the vision of sustainable circular economy

Multiple security domain model of a vehicle in an automated vehicle system

This thesis focuses on the security of automated vehicle platoons. Specifically, it examines the vulnerabilities that occur via disruptions of the information flows among the different types of sensors, the communications network and the control unit in each vehicle of a platoon. Multiple security domain nondeducibility is employed to determine whether the system can detect attacks. The information flows among the various domains provide insights into the vulnerabilities that exist in the system by showing if an attacker’s actions cannot be deduced. If nondeducibility is found to be true, then an attacker can create an undetectable attack. Defeating nondeducibility requires additional information sources, including invariants pertaining to vehicle platoon operation. A platoon is examined from the control unit perspective to determine if the vulnerabilities are associated with preventing situational awareness, which could lead to vehicle crashes --Abstract, page iii