Collaborative Authentication for 6G Networks: An Edge Intelligence based Autonomous Approach

The conventional device authentication of wireless networks usually relies on a security server and centralized process, leading to long latency and risk of single-point of failure. While these challenges might be mitigated by collaborative authentication schemes, their performance remains limited by the rigidity of data collection and aggregated result. They also tend to ignore attacker localization in the collaborative authentication process. To overcome these challenges, a novel collaborative authentication scheme is proposed, where multiple edge devices act as cooperative peers to assist the service provider in distributively authenticating its users by estimating their received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and mobility trajectory (TRA). More explicitly, a distributed learning-based collaborative authentication algorithm is conceived, where the cooperative peers update their authentication models locally, thus the network congestion and response time remain low. Moreover, a situation-aware secure group update algorithm is proposed for autonomously refreshing the set of cooperative peers in the dynamic environment. We also develop an algorithm for localizing a malicious user by the cooperative peers once it is identified. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme is eminently suitable for both indoor and outdoor communication scenarios, and outperforms some existing benchmark schemes

Satellite-Based Communications Security: A Survey of Threats, Solutions, and Research Challenges

Satellite-based Communication systems are gaining renewed momentum in Industry and Academia, thanks to innovative services introduced by leading tech companies and the promising impact they can deliver towards the global connectivity objective tackled by early 6G initiatives. On the one hand, the emergence of new manufacturing processes and radio technologies promises to reduce service costs while guaranteeing outstanding communication latency, available bandwidth, flexibility, and coverage range. On the other hand, cybersecurity techniques and solutions applied in SATCOM links should be updated to reflect the substantial advancements in attacker capabilities characterizing the last two decades. However, business urgency and opportunities are leading operators towards challenging system trade-offs, resulting in an increased attack surface and a general relaxation of the available security services. In this paper, we tackle the cited problems and present a comprehensive survey on the link-layer security threats, solutions, and challenges faced when deploying and operating SATCOM systems.Specifically, we classify the literature on security for SATCOM systems into two main branches, i.e., physical-layer security and cryptography schemes.Then, we further identify specific research domains for each of the identified branches, focusing on dedicated security issues, including, e.g., physical-layer confidentiality, anti-jamming schemes, anti-spoofing strategies, and quantum-based key distribution schemes. For each of the above domains, we highlight the most essential techniques, peculiarities, advantages, disadvantages, lessons learned, and future directions.Finally, we also identify emerging research topics whose additional investigation by Academia and Industry could further attract researchers and investors, ultimately unleashing the full potential behind ubiquitous satellite communications.Comment: 72 page

Analysis of cyber risk and associated concentration of research (ACR)² in the security of vehicular edge clouds

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) is a rapidly growing research space with many issues and challenges. One of the major concerns is to successfully integrate connected technologies, such as cloud infrastructure and edge cloud, into ITS. Security has been identified as one of the greatest challenges for the ITS, and security measures require consideration from design to implementation. This work focuses on providing an analysis of cyber risk and associated concentration of research (ACR2). The introduction of ACR2 approach can be used to consider research challenges in VEC and open up further investigation into those threats that are important but under-researched. That is, the approach can identify very high or high risk areas that have a low research concentration. In this way, this research can lay the foundations for the development of further work in securing the future of ITS

GNSS Vulnerabilities and Existing Solutions:A Review of the Literature

This literature review paper focuses on existing vulnerabilities associated with global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs). With respect to the civilian/non encrypted GNSSs, they are employed for proving positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) solutions across a wide range of industries. Some of these include electric power grids, stock exchange systems, cellular communications, agriculture, unmanned aerial systems and intelligent transportation systems. In this survey paper, physical degradations, existing threats and solutions adopted in academia and industry are presented. In regards to GNSS threats, jamming and spoofing attacks as well as detection techniques adopted in the literature are surveyed and summarized. Also discussed are multipath propagation in GNSS and non line-of-sight (NLoS) detection techniques. The review also identifies and discusses open research areas and techniques which can be investigated for the purpose of enhancing the robustness of GNSS

Localizing Spoofing Attacks on Vehicular GPS Using Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications

GPS spoofing is a problem that is receiving increasing scrutiny due to an increasing number of reported attacks. Plenty of results have been reported on detecting the presence of GPS spoofing attacks. However, very few results currently exist for the localization of spoofing attackers, which is crucial to counteract GPS attacks. In this paper we propose leveraging vehicle-to-vehicle communications to detect and localize spoofing attacks on vehicular navigation GPS. The key idea is to correlate Doppler shift measurements which are reported by most commercial GPS receivers. The approach does not need additional dedicated devices and is easily deployable on modern vehicles equipped with vehicle-to-vehicle communication devices. It is capable of localizing both stationary spoofers and mobile spoofers which could be mounted on a vehicle. Both numerical simulations and experimental tests are conducted to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach