RITA: RIsk-aware Trust-based Architecture for collaborative multi-hop vehicular communications

This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the following article: Kerrache, C. A., Calafate, C. T., Lagraa, N., Cano, J. C., & Manzoni, P. (2016). RITA: RIsk‐aware Trust‐based Architecture for collaborative multi‐hop vehicular communications. Security and Communication Networks, 9(17), 4428-4442, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/sec.1618/abstractTrust establishment over vehicular networks can enhance the security against probable insider attackers. Regrettably, existing solutions assume that the attackers have always a dishonest behavior that remains stable over time. This assumption may be misleading, as the attacker can behave intelligently to avoid being detected. In this paper, we propose a novel solution that combines trust establishment and a risk estimation concerning behavior changes. Our proposal, called risk-aware trust-based architecture, evaluates the trust among vehicles for independent time periods, while the risk estimation computes the behavior variation between smaller, consecutive time periods in order to prevent risks like an intelligent attacker attempting to bypass the security measures deployed. In addition, our proposal works over a collaborative multi-hop broadcast communication technique for both vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-roadside unit messages in order to ensure an efficient dissemination of both safety and infotainment messages. Simulation results evidence the high efficiency of risk-aware trust-based architecture at enhancing the detection ratios by more than 7% compared with existing solutions, such as T-CLAIDS and AECFV, even in the presence of high ratios of attackers, while offering short end-to-end delays and low packet loss ratios.This work was partially supported by both the Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, Programa Estatal de Investigacion, Desarrollo e Innovacion Orientada a los Retos de la Sociedad, Proyectos I+D+I 2014, Spain, under Grant TEC2014-52690-R, and the Ministere de l'enseignement superieur et de la recherche scientifique, Programme National Exceptionnel P.N.E 2015/2016, Algeria.Kerrache, CA.; Tavares De Araujo Cesariny Calafate, CM.; Lagraa, N.; Cano Escribá, JC.; Manzoni, P. (2016). RITA: RIsk-aware Trust-based Architecture for collaborative multi-hop vehicular communications. Security and Communication Networks. 9(17):4428-4442. https://doi.org/10.1002/sec.1618S4428444291

A secured privacy-preserving multi-level blockchain framework for cluster based VANET

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. Existing research shows that Cluster-based Medium Access Control (CB-MAC) protocols perform well in controlling and managing Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET), but requires ensuring improved security and privacy preserving authentication mechanism. To this end, we propose a multi-level blockchain-based privacy-preserving authentication protocol. The paper thoroughly explains the formation of the authentication centers, vehicles registration, and key generation processes. In the proposed architecture, a global authentication center (GAC) is responsible for storing all vehicle information, while Local Authentication Center (LAC) maintains a blockchain to enable quick handover between internal clusters of vehicle. We also propose a modified control packet format of IEEE 802.11 standards to remove the shortcomings of the traditional MAC protocols. Moreover, cluster formation, membership and cluster-head selection, and merging and leaving processes are implemented while considering the safety and non-safety message transmission to increase the performance. All blockchain communication is performed using high speed 5G internet while encrypted information is transmitted while using the RSA-1024 digital signature algorithm for improved security, integrity, and confidentiality. Our proof-of-concept implements the authentication schema while considering multiple virtual machines. With detailed experiments, we show that the proposed method is more efficient in terms of time and storage when compared to the existing methods. Besides, numerical analysis shows that the proposed transmission protocols outperform traditional MAC and benchmark methods in terms of throughput, delay, and packet dropping rate

Virtual Pseudonym-Changing and Dynamic Grouping Policy for Privacy Preservation in VANETs

Location privacy is a critical problem in the vehicular communication networks. Vehicles broadcast their road status information to other entities in the network through beacon messages to inform other entities in the network. The beacon message content consists of the vehicle ID, speed, direction, position, and other information. An adversary could use vehicle identity and positioning information to determine vehicle driver behavior and identity at different visited location spots. A pseudonym can be used instead of the vehicle ID to help in the vehicle location privacy. These pseudonyms should be changed in appropriate way to produce uncertainty for any adversary attempting to identify a vehicle at different locations. In the existing research literature, pseudonyms are changed during silent mode between neighbors. However, the use of a short silent period and the visibility of pseudonyms of direct neighbors provides a mechanism for an adversary to determine the identity of a target vehicle at specific locations. Moreover, privacy is provided to the driver, only within the RSU range; outside it, there is no privacy protection. In this research, we address the problem of location privacy in a highway scenario, where vehicles are traveling at high speeds with diverse traffic density. We propose a Dynamic Grouping and Virtual Pseudonym-Changing (DGVP) scheme for vehicle location privacy. Dynamic groups are formed based on similar status vehicles and cooperatively change pseudonyms. In the case of low traffic density, we use a virtual pseudonym update process. We formally present the model and specify the scheme through High-Level Petri Nets (HLPN). The simulation results indicate that the proposed method improves the anonymity set size and entropy, provides lower traceability, reduces impact on vehicular network applications, and has lower computation cost compared to existing research work

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: vehicular ad-hoc networks, security and caching, TCP in ad-hoc networks and emerging applications. It is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks