Fortified Anonymous Communication Protocol for Location Privacy in WSN: A Modular Approach

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of many hosts called sensors. These sensors can sense a phenomenon (motion, temperature, humidity, average, max, min, etc.) and represent what they sense in a form of data. There are many applications for WSNs including object tracking and monitoring where in most of the cases these objects need protection. In these applications, data privacy itself might not be as important as the privacy of source location. In addition to the source location privacy, sink location privacy should also be provided. Providing an efficient end-to-end privacy solution would be a challenging task to achieve due to the open nature of the WSN. The key schemes needed for end-to-end location privacy are anonymity, observability, capture likelihood, and safety period. We extend this work to allow for countermeasures against multi-local and global adversaries. We present a network model protected against a sophisticated threat model: passive /active and local/multi-local/global attacks. This work provides a solution for end-to-end anonymity and location privacy as well. We will introduce a framework called fortified anonymous communication (FAC) protocol for WSN.http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s15030582

A Novel Energy-Efficient Reservation System for Edge Computing in 6G Vehicular Ad Hoc Network

The roadside unit (RSU) is one of the fundamental components in a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), where a vehicle communicates in infrastructure mode. The RSU has multiple functions, including the sharing of emergency messages and the updating of vehicles about the traffic situation. Deploying and managing a static RSU (sRSU) requires considerable capital and operating expenditures (CAPEX and OPEX), leading to RSUs that are sparsely distributed, continuous handovers amongst RSUs, and, more importantly, frequent RSU interruptions. At present, researchers remain focused on multiple parameters in the sRSU to improve the vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication; however, in this research, the mobile RSU (mRSU), an emerging concept for sixth-generation (6G) edge computing vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), is proposed to improve the connectivity and efficiency of communication among V2I. In addition to this, the mRSU can serve as a computing resource for edge computing applications. This paper proposes a novel energy-efficient reservation technique for edge computing in 6G VANETs that provides an energy-efficient, reservation-based, cost-effective solution by introducing the concept of the mRSU. The simulation outcomes demonstrate that the mRSU exhibits superior performance compared to the sRSU in multiple aspects. The mRSU surpasses the sRSU with a packet delivery ratio improvement of 7.7%, a throughput increase of 5.1%, a reduction in end-to-end delay by 4.4%, and a decrease in hop count by 8.7%. The results are generated across diverse propagation models, employing realistic urban scenarios with varying packet sizes and numbers of vehicles. However, it is important to note that the enhanced performance parameters and improved connectivity with more nodes lead to a significant increase in energy consumption by 2%

Fortified End-to-End Location Privacy and Anonymity in Wireless Sensor Networks: a Modular Approach

Wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of many hosts called sensors. These sensors can sense a phenomenon (motion, temperature, humidity, average, max, min, etc.) and represent what they sense in a form of data. There are many applications for WSNs; including object tracking and monitoring where in most of the cases these objects need protection. In these applications, data privacy itself might not be as important as the privacy of source location. In addition to the source location privacy, sink location privacy should also be provided. Providing an efficient end-to-end privacy solution would be a challenging task to achieve due to the open nature of the WSN. The key schemes needed for end-to-end location privacy are anonymity, observability, capture likelihood, and safety period. We extend this work to allow for countermeasures against multi-local and global adversaries. We present a network model that is protected against a sophisticated threat model: passive /active and local/multi-local/global attacks. This work provides a solution for end-to-end anonymity and location privacy as well. We will introduce a framework called fortified anonymous communication (FAC) protocol for WSN

Group-Based Authentication Mechanisms for Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) provide opportunities to exchange traffic information among vehicles allowing drivers to not only adjust their routes but also prevent possible collisions. Due to the criticality of exchanged information, message authentication which will not expose the privacy of vehicles is required. The majority of current authentication schemes for VANETs depend primarily on public-key cryptography which brings extra overhead in terms of delay and requires infrastructure support for certificate verification. Symmetric-key based techniques can be more efficient, but they introduce significant key maintenance overheads. Herein, by considering the natural group behavior of vehicle communications, we propose an efficient and lightweight symmetric-key based authentication scheme for VANETs based on group communication. Expanding the protocol\u27s flexibility, we also propose an extension which integrates certain benefits of asymmetric-key techniques. We analyze the security properties of our proposed schemes to show there applicability when there is little to no infrastructure support. In addition, the proposed protocol was implemented and tested with real-world vehicle data. Simulation results confirmed the efficiency in terms of delay with respect to other proposed techniques

On Achieving Secure Message Authentication for Vehicular Communications

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) have emerged as a new application scenario that is envisioned to revolutionize the human driving experiences, optimize traffic flow control systems, etc. Addressing security and privacy issues as the prerequisite of VANETs' development must be emphasized. To avoid any possible malicious attack and resource abuse, employing a digital signature scheme is widely recognized as the most effective approach for VANETs to achieve authentication, integrity, and validity. However, when the number of signatures received by a vehicle becomes large, a scalability problem emerges immediately, where a vehicle could be difficult to sequentially verify each received signature within 100-300 ms interval in accordance with the current Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) protocol. In addition, there are still some unsolved attacks in VANETs such as Denial of Service (Dos) attacks, which are not well addressed and waiting for us to solve. In this thesis, we propose the following solutions to address the above mentioned security related issues. First of all, to address the scalability issues, we introduce a novel roadside unit (RSU) aided message authentication scheme, named RAISE, which makes RSUs responsible for verifying the authenticity of messages sent from vehicles and for notifying the results back to vehicles. In addition, RAISE adopts the k-anonymity property for preserving user privacy, where a message cannot be associated with a common vehicle. Secondly, we further consider the situation that RSUs may not cover all the busy streets of a city or a highway in some situations, for example, at the beginning of a VANETs' deployment period, or due to the physical damage of some RSUs, or simply for economic considerations. Under these circumstances, we further propose an efficient identity-based batch signature verification scheme for vehicular communications. The proposed scheme can make vehicles verify a batch of signatures once instead of one after another, and thus it efficiently increases vehicles' message verification speed. In addition, our scheme achieves conditional privacy: a distinct pseudo identity is generated along with each message, and a trust authority can trace a vehicle's real identity from its pseudo identity. In order to find invalid signatures in a batch of signatures, we adopt group testing technique which can find invalid signatures efficiently. Lastly, we identify a DoS attack, called signature jamming attack (SJA), which could easily happen and possibly cause a profound vicious impact on the normal operations of a VANET, yet has not been well addressed in the literature. The SJA can be simply launched at an attacker by flooding a significant number of messages with invalid signatures that jam the surrounding vehicles and prevent them from timely verifying regular and legitimate messages. To countermeasure the SJA, we introduces a hash-based puzzle scheme, which serves as a light-weight filter for excluding likely false signatures before they go through relatively lengthy signature verification process. To further minimize the vicious effect of SJA, we introduce a hash recommendation mechanism, which enables vehicles to share their information so as to more efficiently thwart the SJA. For each research solution, detailed analysis in terms of computational time, and transmission overhead, privacy preservation are performed to validate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed schemes