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

On Secure and Privacy-Aware Sybil Attack Detection in Vehicular Communications

The foreseen dream of Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork (VANET) deployment is obstructed by long-chased security and privacy nightmares. Despite of the increasing demand for perfect privacy, it conflicts with rather more serious security threat called 'Sybil Attack' which refers to, impersonation of one physical entity for many, namely Sybil nodes. In such circumstances, data received from malicious Sybil attacker may seem as if it was received from many distinct physical nodes. Sybil nodes may deliberately mislead other neighbors, resulting in catastrophic situations like traffic jams or even deadly accidents. Preventing such attacks in a privacy-enabled environment is not a trivial task. In this paper, we aim at two conflicting goals, i.e. privacy and Sybil attack in VANET. We leverage pseudonymless beaconing in order to preserve privacy. To cope with Sybil attack, we put forth a twofold strategy. In order to avoid Sybil attack through scheduled beacons, we employ tamper resistant module (TRM) to carry out a pre-assembly data analysis on data that is used to assemble beacons whereas for event reporting message (ERM), we employ road side units (RSUs) to localize Sybil nodes in VANET and report them to the revocation authority(s). RSUs distribute authorized tokens among the benign vehicular nodes which in turn are consumed to report ERMs. RSUs collect ERMs for certain event and figures out if more than one ERM for the same event includes identical token or, if an ERM is sent more than once by the same source. Our proposed scheme preserves privacy in both beacons and ERMs, and provides conditional anonymity where in case of a dispute; malicious attackers are subject to revocation. We also show that our proposed scheme outperforms the previously proposed scheme from security and computational complexity standpoint.</p