Towards Secure Blockchain-enabled Internet of Vehicles: Optimizing Consensus Management Using Reputation and Contract Theory

In Internet of Vehicles (IoV), data sharing among vehicles is essential to improve driving safety and enhance vehicular services. To ensure data sharing security and traceability, highefficiency Delegated Proof-of-Stake consensus scheme as a hard security solution is utilized to establish blockchain-enabled IoV (BIoV). However, as miners are selected from miner candidates by stake-based voting, it is difficult to defend against voting collusion between the candidates and compromised high-stake vehicles, which introduces serious security challenges to the BIoV. To address such challenges, we propose a soft security enhancement solution including two stages: (i) miner selection and (ii) block verification. In the first stage, a reputation-based voting scheme for the blockchain is proposed to ensure secure miner selection. This scheme evaluates candidates' reputation by using both historical interactions and recommended opinions from other vehicles. The candidates with high reputation are selected to be active miners and standby miners. In the second stage, to prevent internal collusion among the active miners, a newly generated block is further verified and audited by the standby miners. To incentivize the standby miners to participate in block verification, we formulate interactions between the active miners and the standby miners by using contract theory, which takes block verification security and delay into consideration. Numerical results based on a real-world dataset indicate that our schemes are secure and efficient for data sharing in BIoV.Comment: 12 pages, submitted for possible journal publicatio

Post-Westgate SWAT : C4ISTAR Architectural Framework for Autonomous Network Integrated Multifaceted Warfighting Solutions Version 1.0 : A Peer-Reviewed Monograph

Police SWAT teams and Military Special Forces face mounting pressure and challenges from adversaries that can only be resolved by way of ever more sophisticated inputs into tactical operations. Lethal Autonomy provides constrained military/security forces with a viable option, but only if implementation has got proper empirically supported foundations. Autonomous weapon systems can be designed and developed to conduct ground, air and naval operations. This monograph offers some insights into the challenges of developing legal, reliable and ethical forms of autonomous weapons, that address the gap between Police or Law Enforcement and Military operations that is growing exponentially small. National adversaries are today in many instances hybrid threats, that manifest criminal and military traits, these often require deployment of hybrid-capability autonomous weapons imbued with the capability to taken on both Military and/or Security objectives. The Westgate Terrorist Attack of 21st September 2013 in the Westlands suburb of Nairobi, Kenya is a very clear manifestation of the hybrid combat scenario that required military response and police investigations against a fighting cell of the Somalia based globally networked Al Shabaab terrorist group.Comment: 52 pages, 6 Figures, over 40 references, reviewed by a reade

Resilience of Traffic Networks with Partially Controlled Routing

This paper investigates the use of Infrastructure-To-Vehicle (I2V) communication to generate routing suggestions for drivers in transportation systems, with the goal of optimizing a measure of overall network congestion. We define link-wise levels of trust to tolerate the non-cooperative behavior of part of the driver population, and we propose a real-time optimization mechanism that adapts to the instantaneous network conditions and to sudden changes in the levels of trust. Our framework allows us to quantify the improvement in travel time in relation to the degree at which drivers follow the routing suggestions. We then study the resilience of the system, measured as the smallest change in routing choices that results in roads reaching their maximum capacity. Interestingly, our findings suggest that fluctuations in the extent to which drivers follow the provided routing suggestions can cause failures of certain links. These results imply that the benefits of using Infrastructure-To-Vehicle communication come at the cost of new fragilities, that should be appropriately addressed in order to guarantee the reliable operation of the infrastructure.Comment: Accepted for presentation at the IEEE 2019 American Control Conferenc

The Meeting of Acquaintances: A Cost-efficient Authentication Scheme for Light-weight Objects with Transient Trust Level and Plurality Approach

Wireless sensor networks consist of a large number of distributed sensor nodes so that potential risks are becoming more and more unpredictable. The new entrants pose the potential risks when they move into the secure zone. To build a door wall that provides safe and secured for the system, many recent research works applied the initial authentication process. However, the majority of the previous articles only focused on the Central Authority (CA) since this leads to an increase in the computation cost and energy consumption for the specific cases on the Internet of Things (IoT). Hence, in this article, we will lessen the importance of these third parties through proposing an enhanced authentication mechanism that includes key management and evaluation based on the past interactions to assist the objects joining a secured area without any nearby CA. We refer to a mobility dataset from CRAWDAD collected at the University Politehnica of Bucharest and rebuild into a new random dataset larger than the old one. The new one is an input for a simulated authenticating algorithm to observe the communication cost and resource usage of devices. Our proposal helps the authenticating flexible, being strict with unknown devices into the secured zone. The threshold of maximum friends can modify based on the optimization of the symmetric-key algorithm to diminish communication costs (our experimental results compare to previous schemes less than 2000 bits) and raise flexibility in resource-constrained environments.Comment: 27 page