Securing IP Mobility Management for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The proliferation of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs) applications, such as Internet access and Infotainment, highlights the requirements for improving the underlying mobility management protocols for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). Mobility management protocols in VANETs are envisioned to support mobile nodes (MNs), i.e., vehicles, with seamless communications, in which service continuity is guaranteed while vehicles are roaming through different RoadSide Units (RSUs) with heterogeneous wireless technologies. Due to its standardization and widely deployment, IP mobility (also called Mobile IP (MIP)) is the most popular mobility management protocol used for mobile networks including VANETs. In addition, because of the diversity of possible applications, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) issues many MIP's standardizations, such as MIPv6 and NEMO for global mobility, and Proxy MIP (PMIPv6) for localized mobility. However, many challenges have been posed for integrating IP mobility with VANETs, including the vehicle's high speeds, multi-hop communications, scalability, and ef ficiency. From a security perspective, we observe three main challenges: 1) each vehicle's anonymity and location privacy, 2) authenticating vehicles in multi-hop communications, and 3) physical-layer location privacy. In transmitting mobile IPv6 binding update signaling messages, the mobile node's Home Address (HoA) and Care-of Address (CoA) are transmitted as plain-text, hence they can be revealed by other network entities and attackers. The mobile node's HoA and CoA represent its identity and its current location, respectively, therefore revealing an MN's HoA means breaking its anonymity while revealing an MN's CoA means breaking its location privacy. On one hand, some existing anonymity and location privacy schemes require intensive computations, which means they cannot be used in such time-restricted seamless communications. On the other hand, some schemes only achieve seamless communication through low anonymity and location privacy levels. Therefore, the trade-off between the network performance, on one side, and the MN's anonymity and location privacy, on the other side, makes preservation of privacy a challenging issue. In addition, for PMIPv6 to provide IP mobility in an infrastructure-connected multi-hop VANET, an MN uses a relay node (RN) for communicating with its Mobile Access Gateway (MAG). Therefore, a mutual authentication between the MN and RN is required to thwart authentication attacks early in such scenarios. Furthermore, for a NEMO-based VANET infrastructure, which is used in public hotspots installed inside moving vehicles, protecting physical-layer location privacy is a prerequisite for achieving privacy in upper-layers such as the IP-layer. Due to the open nature of the wireless environment, a physical-layer attacker can easily localize users by employing signals transmitted from these users. In this dissertation, we address those security challenges by proposing three security schemes to be employed for different mobility management scenarios in VANETs, namely, the MIPv6, PMIPv6, and Network Mobility (NEMO) protocols. First, for MIPv6 protocol and based on the onion routing and anonymizer, we propose an anonymous and location privacy-preserving scheme (ALPP) that involves two complementary sub-schemes: anonymous home binding update (AHBU) and anonymous return routability (ARR). In addition, anonymous mutual authentication and key establishment schemes have been proposed, to authenticate a mobile node to its foreign gateway and create a shared key between them. Unlike existing schemes, ALPP alleviates the tradeoff between the networking performance and the achieved privacy level. Combining onion routing and the anonymizer in the ALPP scheme increases the achieved location privacy level, in which no entity in the network except the mobile node itself can identify this node's location. Using the entropy model, we show that ALPP achieves a higher degree of anonymity than that achieved by the mix-based scheme. Compared to existing schemes, the AHBU and ARR sub-schemes achieve smaller computation overheads and thwart both internal and external adversaries. Simulation results demonstrate that our sub-schemes have low control-packets routing delays, and are suitable for seamless communications. Second, for the multi-hop authentication problem in PMIPv6-based VANET, we propose EM3A, a novel mutual authentication scheme that guarantees the authenticity of both MN and RN. EM3A thwarts authentication attacks, including Denial of service (DoS), collusion, impersonation, replay, and man-in-the-middle attacks. EM3A works in conjunction with a proposed scheme for key establishment based on symmetric polynomials, to generate a shared secret key between an MN and an RN. This scheme achieves lower revocation overhead than that achieved by existing symmetric polynomial-based schemes. For a PMIP domain with n points of attachment and a symmetric polynomial of degree t, our scheme achieves t x 2^n-secrecy, whereas the existing symmetric polynomial-based authentication schemes achieve only t-secrecy. Computation and communication overhead analysis as well as simulation results show that EM3A achieves low authentication delay and is suitable for seamless multi-hop IP communications. Furthermore, we present a case study of a multi-hop authentication PMIP (MA-PMIP) implemented in vehicular networks. EM3A represents the multi-hop authentication in MA-PMIP to mutually authenticate the roaming vehicle and its relay vehicle. Compared to other authentication schemes, we show that our MA-PMIP protocol with EM3A achieves 99.6% and 96.8% reductions in authentication delay and communication overhead, respectively. Finally, we consider the physical-layer location privacy attacks in the NEMO-based VANETs scenario, such as would be presented by a public hotspot installed inside a moving vehicle. We modify the obfuscation, i.e., concealment, and power variability ideas and propose a new physical-layer location privacy scheme, the fake point-cluster based scheme, to prevent attackers from localizing users inside NEMO-based VANET hotspots. Involving the fake point and cluster based sub-schemes, the proposed scheme can: 1) confuse the attackers by increasing the estimation errors of their Received Signal Strength (RSSs) measurements, and 2) prevent attackers' monitoring devices from detecting the user's transmitted signals. We show that our scheme not only achieves higher location privacy, but also increases the overall network performance. Employing correctness, accuracy, and certainty as three different metrics, we analytically measure the location privacy achieved by our proposed scheme. In addition, using extensive simulations, we demonstrate that the fake point-cluster based scheme can be practically implemented in high-speed VANETs' scenarios

Research on security and privacy in vehicular ad hoc networks

Los sistemas de redes ad hoc vehiculares (VANET) tienen como objetivo proporcionar una plataforma para diversas aplicaciones que pueden mejorar la seguridad vial, la eficiencia del tráfico, la asistencia a la conducción, la regulación del transporte, etc. o que pueden proveer de una mejor información y entretenimiento a los usuarios de los vehículos. Actualmente se está llevando a cabo un gran esfuerzo industrial y de investigación para desarrollar un mercado que se estima alcance en un futuro varios miles de millones de euros. Mientras que los enormes beneficios que se esperan de las comunicaciones vehiculares y el gran número de vehículos son los puntos fuertes de las VANET, su principal debilidad es la vulnerabilidad a los ataques contra la seguridad y la privacidad.En esta tesis proponemos cuatro protocolos para conseguir comunicaciones seguras entre vehículos. En nuestra primera propuesta empleamos a todas las unidades en carretera (RSU) para mantener y gestionar un grupo en tiempo real dentro de su rango de comunicación. Los vehículos que entren al grupo de forma anónima pueden emitir mensajes vehículo a vehículo (V2V) que inmediatamente pueden ser verificados por los vehículos del mismo grupo (y grupos de vecinos). Sin embargo, en la primera fase del despliegue de este sistema las RSU pueden no estar bien distribuídas. Consecuentemente, se propone un conjunto de mecanismos para hacer frente a la seguridad, privacidad y los requisitos de gestión de una VANET a gran escala sin la suposición de que las RSU estén densamente distribuidas. La tercera propuesta se centra principalmente en la compresión de las evidencias criptográficas que nos permitirán demostrar, por ejemplo, quien era el culpable en caso de accidente. Por último, investigamos los requisitos de seguridad de los sistemas basados en localización (LBS) sobre VANETs y proponemos un nuevo esquema para la preservación de la privacidad de la localización en estos sistemas sobre dichas redes.Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) systems aim at providing a platform for various applications that can improve traffic safety and efficiency, driver assistance, transportation regulation, infotainment, etc. There is substantial research and industrial effort to develop this market. It is estimated that the market for vehicular communications will reach several billion euros. While the tremendous benefits expected from vehicular communications and the huge number of vehicles are strong points of VANETs, their weakness is vulnerability to attacks against security and privacy.In this thesis, we propose four protocols for secure vehicle communications. In our first proposal, we employ each road-side unit (RSU) to maintain and manage an on-the-fly group within its communication range. Vehicles entering the group can anonymously broadcast vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) messages, which can be instantly verified by the vehicles in the same group (and neighbor groups). However, at the early stage of VANET deployment, the RSUs may not be well distributed. We then propose a set of mechanisms to address the security, privacy, and management requirements of a large-scale VANET without the assumption of densely distributed RSUs. The third proposal is mainly focused on compressing cryptographic witnesses in VANETs. Finally, we investigate the security requirements of LBS in VANETs and propose a new privacy-preserving LBS scheme for those networks

Data Substantiation in Mobility

The world is embracing the presence of connected autonomous vehicles which are expected to play a major role in the future of intelligent transport systems. Given such connectivity, vehicles in the networks are vulnerable to making incorrect decisions due to anomalous data. No sophisticated attacks are required; just a vehicle reporting anomalous speeds would be enough to disrupt the entire traffic flow. Detection of such anomalies is vital to ensure the security of a vehicular network. This thesis proposes the use of traffic flow theory for anomalous data detection in vehicular networks, by evaluating the consistency of microscopic parameters which are derived by traffic flow theory with macroscopic views of traffic under different traffic conditions. Though little attention has been given to using traffic flow properties to determine anomalous basic safety message data, the fundamental nature of traffic flow properties makes it a robust assessment tool. The aim of this thesis is to develop a robust data substantiation framework for vehicular networks using traffic flow fundamentals. The aim is fulfilled in three objectives; (1) to provide an overview of the context in terms of existing data substantiation methods, vehicular communication, and traffic flow theory, (2) to develop data substantiation models to detect anomalies irrespective of the cause of the anomality, and (3) to assess the applicability of traffic flow theory for data substantiation in vehicular networks. Chapters 1 and 2 are introductions and literature reviews respectively. The first main chapter describes the context of vehicular networks, traffic flow theory, and the intuition of applying traffic flow theory for substantiation in vehicular networks. The next three chapters elaborate, formulate, demonstrate, and evaluate the use of macroscopic views of traffic to substantiate microscopic data in vehicular networks. The first of these discusses the use of steady state conditions in traffic flow theory to substantiate data in vehicular networks, and the second describes the use of shockwave theory in traffic to substantiate data in vehicular networks. The third chapter develops a data substantiation model utilising localised views of traffic to provide an additional resolution to the previous models

New Security Definitions, Constructions and Applications of Proxy Re-Encryption

La externalización de la gestión de la información es una práctica cada vez más común, siendo la computación en la nube (en inglés, cloud computing) el paradigma más representativo. Sin embargo, este enfoque genera también preocupación con respecto a la seguridad y privacidad debido a la inherente pérdida del control sobre los datos. Las soluciones tradicionales, principalmente basadas en la aplicación de políticas y estrategias de control de acceso, solo reducen el problema a una cuestión de confianza, que puede romperse fácilmente por los proveedores de servicio, tanto de forma accidental como intencionada. Por lo tanto, proteger la información externalizada, y al mismo tiempo, reducir la confianza que es necesario establecer con los proveedores de servicio, se convierte en un objetivo inmediato. Las soluciones basadas en criptografía son un mecanismo crucial de cara a este fin. Esta tesis está dedicada al estudio de un criptosistema llamado recifrado delegado (en inglés, proxy re-encryption), que constituye una solución práctica a este problema, tanto desde el punto de vista funcional como de eficiencia. El recifrado delegado es un tipo de cifrado de clave pública que permite delegar en una entidad la capacidad de transformar textos cifrados de una clave pública a otra, sin que pueda obtener ninguna información sobre el mensaje subyacente. Desde un punto de vista funcional, el recifrado delegado puede verse como un medio de delegación segura de acceso a información cifrada, por lo que representa un candidato natural para construir mecanismos de control de acceso criptográficos. Aparte de esto, este tipo de cifrado es, en sí mismo, de gran interés teórico, ya que sus definiciones de seguridad deben balancear al mismo tiempo la seguridad de los textos cifrados con la posibilidad de transformarlos mediante el recifrado, lo que supone una estimulante dicotomía. Las contribuciones de esta tesis siguen un enfoque transversal, ya que van desde las propias definiciones de seguridad del recifrado delegado, hasta los detalles específicos de potenciales aplicaciones, pasando por construcciones concretas

Unleashing the power of internet of things and blockchain: A comprehensive analysis and future directions.

As the fusion of the Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain technology advances, it is increasingly shaping diverse fields. The potential of this convergence to fortify security, enhance privacy, and streamline operations has ignited considerable academic interest, resulting in an impressive body of literature. However, there is a noticeable scarcity of studies employing Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to dissect and categorize this field. This review paper endeavours to bridge this gap by meticulously analysing a dataset of 4455 journal articles drawn solely from the Scopus database, cantered around IoT and blockchain applications. Utilizing LDA, we have extracted 14 distinct topics from the collection, offering a broad view of the research themes in this interdisciplinary domain. Our exploration underscores an upswing in research pertaining to IoT and blockchain, emphasizing the rising prominence of this technological amalgamation. Among the most recurrent themes are IoT and blockchain integration in supply chain management and blockchain in healthcare data management and security, indicating the significant potential of this convergence to transform supply chains and secure healthcare data. Meanwhile, the less frequently discussed topics include access control and management in blockchain-based IoT systems and energy efficiency in wireless sensor networks using blockchain and IoT. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to apply LDA in the context of IoT and blockchain research, providing unique perspectives on the existing literature. Moreover, our findings pave the way for proposed future research directions, stimulating further investigation into the less explored aspects and sustaining the growth of this dynamic field

Effective Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms for Vehicle-to-Everything Services

Owing to the advancement of wireless communication technologies, drivers can rely on smart connected vehicles to communicate with each other, roadside units, pedestrians, and remote service providers to enjoy a large amount of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) services, including navigation, parking, ride hailing, and car sharing. These V2X services provide different functions for bettering travel experiences, which have a bunch of benefits. In the real world, even without smart connected vehicles, drivers as users can utilize their smartphones and mobile applications to access V2X services and connect their smartphones to vehicles through some interfaces, e.g., IOS Carplay and Android Auto. In this way, they can still enjoy V2X services through modern car infotainment systems installed on vehicles. Most of the V2X services are data-centric and data-intensive, i.e., users have to upload personal data to a remote service provider, and the service provider can continuously collect a user's data and offer personalized services. However, the data acquired from users may include users' sensitive information, which may expose user privacy and cause serious consequences. To protect user privacy, a basic privacy-preserving mechanism, i.e, anonymization, can be applied in V2X services. Nevertheless, a big obstacle arises as well: user anonymization may affect V2X services' availability. As users become anonymous, users may behave selfishly and maliciously to break the functions of a V2X service without being detected and the service may become unavailable. In short, there exist a conflict between privacy and availability, which is caused by different requirements of users and service providers. In this thesis, we have identified three major conflicts between privacy and availability for V2X services: privacy vs. linkability, privacy vs. accountability, privacy vs. reliability, and then have proposed and designed three privacy-preserving mechanisms to resolve these conflicts. Firstly, the thesis investigates the conflict between privacy and linkability in an automated valet parking (AVP) service, where users can reserve a parking slot for their vehicles such that vehicles can achieve automated valet parking. As an optional privacy-preserving measure, users can choose to anonymize their identities when booking a parking slot for their vehicles. In this way, although user privacy is protected by anonymization, malicious users can repeatedly send parking reservation requests to a parking service provider to make the system unavailable (i.e., "Double-Reservation Attack"). Aiming at this conflict, a security model is given in the thesis to clearly define necessary privacy requirements and potential attacks in an AVP system, and then a privacy-preserving reservation scheme has been proposed based on BBS+ signature and zero-knowledge proof. In the proposed scheme, users can keep anonymous since users only utilize a one-time unlinkable token generated from his/her anonymous credential to achieve parking reservations. In the meantime, by utilizing proxy re-signature, the scheme can also guarantee that one user can only have one token at a time to resist against "Double-Reservation Attack". Secondly, the thesis investigates the conflict between privacy and accountability in a car sharing service, where users can conveniently rent a shared car without human intervention. One basic demand for car sharing service is to check the user's identity to determine his/her validity and enable the user to be accountable if he/she did improper behavior. If the service provider allows users to hide their identities and achieve anonymization to protect user privacy, naturally the car sharing service is unavailable. Aiming at this conflict, a decentralized, privacy-preserving, and accountable car sharing architecture has been proposed in the thesis, where multiple dynamic validation servers are employed to build decentralized trust for users. Under this architecture, the thesis proposes a privacy-preserving identity management scheme to assist in managing users' identities in a dynamic manner based on a verifiable secret sharing/redistribution technique, i.e. the validation servers who manage users' identities are dynamically changed with the time advancing. Moreover, the scheme enables a majority of dynamic validation servers to recover the misbehaving users' identities and guarantees that honest users' identities are confidential to achieve privacy preservation and accountability at the same time. Thirdly, the thesis investigates the conflict between privacy and reliability in a road condition monitoring service, where users can report road conditions to a monitoring service provider to help construct a live map based on crowdsourcing. Usually, a reputation-based mechanism is applied in the service to measure a user's reliability. However, this mechanism cannot be easily integrated with a privacy-preserving mechanism based on user anonymization. When users are anonymous, they can upload arbitrary reports to destroy the service quality and make the service unavailable. Aiming at this conflict, a privacy-preserving crowdsourcing-based road condition monitoring scheme has been proposed in the thesis. By leveraging homomorphic commitments and PS signature, the scheme supports anonymous user reputation management without the assistance of any third-party authority. Furthermore, the thesis proposes several zero-knowledge proof protocols to ensure that a user can keep anonymous and unlinkable but a monitoring service provider can still judge the reliability of this user's report through his/her reputation score. To sum up, with more attention being paid to privacy issues, how to protect user privacy for V2X services becomes more significant. The thesis proposes three effective privacy-preserving mechanisms for V2X services, which resolve the conflict between privacy and availability and can be conveniently integrated into current V2X applications since no trusted third party authority is required. The proposed approaches should be valuable for achieving practical privacy preservation in V2X services

Efficient, Reliable and Secure Distributed Protocols for MANETs

This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part explores the difficulties of bootstrapping and maintaining a security infrastructure for military Mobile Ad Hoc NETworks (MANETs). The assumed absence of dedicated infrastructural elements necessitates, that security services in ad hoc networks may be built from the ground up. We develop a cluster algorithm, incorporating a trust metric in the cluster head selection process to securely determine constituting nodes in a distributed Trust Authority (TA) for MANETs. Following this, we develop non-interactive key distribution protocols for the distribution of symmetric keys in MANETs. We explore the computational requirements of our protocols and simulate the key distribution process. The second part of this thesis builds upon the security infrastructure of the first part and examines two distributed protocols for MANETs. Firstly, we present a novel algorithm for enhancing the efficiency and robustness of distributed protocols for contacting TA nodes in MANETs. Our algorithm determines a quorum of trust authority nodes required for a distributed protocol run based upon a set of quality metrics, and establishes an efficient routing strategy to contact these nodes. Secondly, we present a probabilistic path authentication scheme based on message authentication codes (MACs). Our scheme minimises both communication and computation overhead in authenticating the path over which a stream of packets travels and facilitates the detection of adversarial nodes on the path

Privacy in the Smart City - Applications, Technologies, Challenges and Solutions

Many modern cities strive to integrate information technology into every aspect of city life to create so-called smart cities. Smart cities rely on a large number of application areas and technologies to realize complex interactions between citizens, third parties, and city departments. This overwhelming complexity is one reason why holistic privacy protection only rarely enters the picture. A lack of privacy can result in discrimination and social sorting, creating a fundamentally unequal society. To prevent this, we believe that a better understanding of smart cities and their privacy implications is needed. We therefore systematize the application areas, enabling technologies, privacy types, attackers and data sources for the attacks, giving structure to the fuzzy term “smart city”. Based on our taxonomies, we describe existing privacy-enhancing technologies, review the state of the art in real cities around the world, and discuss promising future research directions. Our survey can serve as a reference guide, contributing to the development of privacy-friendly smart cities

New Waves of IoT Technologies Research – Transcending Intelligence and Senses at the Edge to Create Multi Experience Environments

The next wave of Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) brings new technological developments that incorporate radical advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), edge computing processing, new sensing capabilities, more security protection and autonomous functions accelerating progress towards the ability for IoT systems to self-develop, self-maintain and self-optimise. The emergence of hyper autonomous IoT applications with enhanced sensing, distributed intelligence, edge processing and connectivity, combined with human augmentation, has the potential to power the transformation and optimisation of industrial sectors and to change the innovation landscape. This chapter is reviewing the most recent advances in the next wave of the IoT by looking not only at the technology enabling the IoT but also at the platforms and smart data aspects that will bring intelligence, sustainability, dependability, autonomy, and will support human-centric solutions.acceptedVersio