Software Protection and Secure Authentication for Autonomous Vehicular Cloud Computing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing every technology we deal with. Autonomy has been a sought-after goal in vehicles, and now more than ever we are very close to that goal. Vehicles before were dumb mechanical devices, now they are becoming smart, computerized, and connected coined as Autonomous Vehicles (AVs). Moreover, researchers found a way to make more use of these enormous capabilities and introduced Autonomous Vehicles Cloud Computing (AVCC). In these platforms, vehicles can lend their unused resources and sensory data to join AVCC. In this dissertation, we investigate security and privacy issues in AVCC. As background, we built our vision of a layer-based approach to thoroughly study state-of-the-art literature in the realm of AVs. Particularly, we examined some cyber-attacks and compared their promising mitigation strategies from our perspective. Then, we focused on two security issues involving AVCC: software protection and authentication. For the first problem, our concern is protecting client’s programs executed on remote AVCC resources. Such a usage scenario is susceptible to information leakage and reverse-engineering. Hence, we proposed compiler-based obfuscation techniques. What distinguishes our techniques, is that they are generic and software-based and utilize the intermediate representation, hence, they are platform agnostic, hardware independent and support different high level programming languages. Our results demonstrate that the control-flow of obfuscated code versions are more complicated making it unintelligible for timing side-channels. For the second problem, we focus on protecting AVCC from unauthorized access or intrusions, which may cause misuse or service disruptions. Therefore, we propose a strong privacy-aware authentication technique for users accessing AVCC services or vehicle sharing their resources with the AVCC. Our technique modifies robust function encryption, which protects stakeholder’s confidentiality and withstands linkability and “known-ciphertexts” attacks. Thus, we utilize an authentication server to search and match encrypted data by performing dot product operations. Additionally, we developed another lightweight technique, based on KNN algorithm, to authenticate vehicles at computationally limited charging stations using its owner’s encrypted iris data. Our security and privacy analysis proved that our schemes achieved privacy-preservation goals. Our experimental results showed that our schemes have reasonable computation and communications overheads and efficiently scalable

Future cities and autonomous vehicles: analysis of the barriers to full adoption

The inevitable upcoming technology of autonomous vehicles (AVs) will affect our cities and several aspects of our lives. The widespread adoption of AVs repose at crossing distinct barriers that prevent their full adoption. This paper presents a critical review of recent debates about AVs and analyse the key barriers to their full adoption. This study has employed a mixed research methodology on a selected database of recently published research works. Thus, the outcomes of this review integrate the barriers into two main categories; (1) User/Government perspectives that include (i) Users' acceptance and behaviour, (ii) Safety, and (iii) Legislation. (2) Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) which include (i) Computer software and hardware, (ii) Communication systems V2X, and (iii) accurate positioning and mapping. Furthermore, a framework of barriers and their relations to AVs system architecture has been suggested to support future research and technology development

Optimization of vehicular networks in smart cities: from agile optimization to learnheuristics and simheuristics

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a fundamental component of intelligent transportation systems in smart cities. With the support of open and real-time data, these networks of inter-connected vehicles constitute an ‘Internet of vehicles’ with the potential to significantly enhance citizens’ mobility and last-mile delivery in urban, peri-urban, and metropolitan areas. However, the proper coordination and logistics of VANETs raise a number of optimization challenges that need to be solved. After reviewing the state of the art on the concepts of VANET optimization and open data in smart cities, this paper discusses some of the most relevant optimization challenges in this area. Since most of the optimization problems are related to the need for real-time solutions or to the consideration of uncertainty and dynamic environments, the paper also discusses how some VANET challenges can be addressed with the use of agile optimization algorithms and the combination of metaheuristics with simulation and machine learning methods. The paper also offers a numerical analysis that measures the impact of using these optimization techniques in some related problems. Our numerical analysis, based on real data from Open Data Barcelona, demonstrates that the constructive heuristic outperforms the random scenario in the CDP combined with vehicular networks, resulting in maximizing the minimum distance between facilities while meeting capacity requirements with the fewest facilities.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Traffic Road Congestion System using by the internet of vehicles (IoV)

Traffic problems have increased in modern life due to a huge number of vehicles, big cities, and ignoring the traffic rules. Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) has improved the traffic system in previous some and plays a vital role in the best traffic control system in big cities. But due to some limitations, it is not enough to control some problems in specific conditions. Now a day invention of new technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT) is used for collaboratively and efficiently performing tasks. This technology was also introduced in the transportation system which makes it an intelligent transportation system (ITS), this is called the Internet of vehicles (IOV). We will elaborate on traffic problems in the traditional system and elaborate on the benefits, enhancements, and reasons to better IOV by Systematic Literature Review (SLR). This technique will be implemented by targeting needed papers through many search phrases. A systematic literature review is used for 121 articles between 2014 and 2023. The IoV technologies and tools are required to create the IoV and resolve some traffic rules through SUMO (simulation of urban mobility) which is used for the design and simulation the road traffic. We have tried to contribute to the best model of the traffic control system. This paper will analysis two vehicular congestion control models in term of select the optimized and efficient model and elaborate on the reasons for efficiency by searching the solution SLR based questions. Due to some efficient features, we have suggested the IOV based on vehicular clouds. These efficient features make this model the best and most effective than the traditional model which is a great reason to enhance the network system.Comment: pages 16, figures

Vaness: DNS em redes veiculares para suporte a utilizadores itinerantes

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e TelemáticaVehicular networks, also known as VANETs, are an ad-hoc network formed by vehicles and road-side units. Nowadays they have been attracting big interest both from researchers as from the automotive industry. With the upcoming of automotive specific operating systems and self-driving cars, the use of applications on vehicles and the integration with common mobile devices is becoming a big part of VANETs. Although many advances have been made on this field, there is still a big discrepancy between the communication layer services provided by VANETs and the user level services, namely those accessible through mobile applications on other networks and technologies. Users and developers are accustomed to user-to-user or user-tobusiness communication without explicit concerns related with the available communication transport layer. Such is not possible in VANETs since people may use more than one vehicle. However, to send a message to a specific user in these networks, there is a need to know the ID of the vehicle where the user is, meaning that there is a lack of services that map each individual user to VANETs endpoint (vehicle identification). This dissertation work proposes VANESS, a naming service as a resource to support user-to-user communication within a heterogeneous scenario comprising typical ISP scenario and VANETs focused on mobile devices. The proposed system is able to map the user to an end point either locally (i.e. there is not internet connection at all), online (i.e. system is not in a vehicular network but has direct internet connection) and using a gateway (i.e. the system is in a vehicular network where some of the nodes have internet access and will act as a gateway). VANESS was fully implemented on android OS with results proving his viability, and partially on iOS showing its multiplatform capabilities.As redes veiculares, também conhecidas por VANETs, são redes ad-hoc formadas por veículos e road-site units. Hoje em dia estas redes têm atraído bastante interesse tanto por parte de investigadores como da indústria automóvel. Com o aparecimento de sistemas operativos especificamente dedicados a automóveis e carros de condução autónoma, o uso de aplicações em veículos e a integração com dipositivos móveis está-se a tornar uma parte cada vez maior nas VANETs. Apesar dos grandes avanços tecnológicos realizados nesta área, ainda existe uma grande discrepância entre os serviços de camada de comunicação disponibilizados pelas VANETs e os serviços ao nível do utilizador, nomeadamente aqueles acessíveis a partir de aplicações móveis noutras redes e tecnologias. Os utilizadores e programadores estão habituados a interações utilizador-utilizador ou utilizadorempresa sem preocupações explícitas sobre a camada de transporte em causa. Isto não é possível em redes VANETs, uma vez que cada pessoa pode usar vários veículos. No entanto, uma mensagem para ser enviada para um utilizador específico através destas redes precisa do indentificador do veículo onde tal utilizador está, ou seja, existe uma falta de serviços que mapeiem cada utilizador individual a nós na VANET (identificação do veículo). O trabalho desta dissertação propõe o sistema VANESS, um serviço de nomes (naming service) disponibilizado como um recurso para suporte a comunicação utilizador-a-utilizador num cenário heterogéneo englobando o típico ISP e VANETs focadas em dispositivos móveis. O sistema proposto é capaz de mapear um utilizador a um veículo tanto localmente (i.e. não existe ligação à internet), online (i.e. o sistema não está numa rede veicular mas tem acesso direto à internet) e usando um gateway (i.e. o sistema está numa rede veicular onde algum nó tem acesso à internet e irá servir como gateway). VANESS foi integralmente implementado em Android OS, onde os resultados dos testes mostram que é um sistema viável, e parcialmente em iOS mostrando a sua capacidade para multi-plataformas

Computing paradigms in emerging vehicular environments: a review

Determining how to structure vehicular network environments can be done in various ways. Here, we highlight vehicle networks' evolution from vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANET) to the internet of vehicles (IoVs), listing their benefits and limitations. We also highlight the reasons in adopting wireless technologies, in particular, IEEE 802.11p and 5G vehicle-to-everything, as well as the use of paradigms able to store and analyze a vast amount of data to produce intelligence and their applications in vehicular environments. We also correlate the use of each of these paradigms with the desire to meet existing intelligent transportation systems' requirements. The presentation of each paradigm is given from a historical and logical standpoint. In particular, vehicular fog computing improves on the deficiences of vehicular cloud computing, so both are not exclusive from the application point of view. We also emphasize some security issues that are linked to the characteristics of these paradigms and vehicular networks, showing that they complement each other and share problems and limitations. As these networks still have many opportunities to grow in both concept and application, we finally discuss concepts and technologies that we believe are beneficial. Throughout this work, we emphasize the crucial role of these concepts for the well-being of humanity

Named Data Networking in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks: State-of-the-Art and Challenges

International audienceInformation-Centric Networking (ICN) has been proposed as one of the future Internet architectures. It is poised to address the challenges faced by today's Internet that include, but not limited to, scalability, addressing, security, and privacy. Furthermore, it also aims at meeting the requirements for new emerging Internet applications. To realize ICN, Named Data Networking (NDN) is one of the recent implementations of ICN that provides a suitable communication approach due to its clean slate design and simple communication model. There are a plethora of applications realized through ICN in different domains where data is the focal point of communication. One such domain is Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) realized through Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) where vehicles exchange information and content with each other and with the infrastructure. To date, excellent research results have been yielded in the VANET domain aiming at safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich driving experience. However, due to the dynamic topologies, host-centric model, and ephemeral nature of vehicular communication, various challenges are faced by VANET that hinder the realization of successful vehicular networks and adversely affect the data dissemination, content delivery, and user experiences. To fill these gaps, NDN has been extensively used as underlying communication paradigm for VANET. Inspired by the extensive research results in NDN-based VANET, in this paper, we provide a detailed and systematic review of NDN-driven VANET. More precisely, we investigate the role of NDN in VANET and discuss the feasibility of NDN architecture in VANET environment. Subsequently, we cover in detail, NDN-based naming, routing and forwarding, caching, mobility, and security mechanism for VANET. Furthermore, we discuss the existing standards, solutions, and simulation tools used in NDN-based VANET. Finally, we also identify open challenges and issues faced by NDN-driven VANET and highlight future research directions that should be addressed by the research community

Security Enhancement of IoT and Fog Computing Via Blockchain Applications

Blockchain technology is now becoming highly appealing to the next generation because it is better tailored to the information age. Blockchain technologies can also be used in the Internet of Things (IoT) and fog computing. The development of IoT and Fog Computing technologies in different fields has resulted in a major improvement in distributed networks. Blockchain technology is now becoming highly appealing to the next generation because it is better tailored to the information age. Blockchain technologies can also be used in IoT and fog computing.  The blockchain principle necessitates a transparent data storage mechanism for storing and exchanging data and transactions throughout the network. In this paper, first, we explained Blockchain, its architecture, and its security. Then we view Blockchain application in IoT security. Then we explained Fog computing, Generic Security Requirements for Fog Computing, and we also discuss Blockchain applications that enhance Fog Computing Security. Finally, we conduct a review of some recent literature on using Blockchain applications to improve the security of IoT and fog computing and a comparison of the methods proposed in the literature

Proof-of-Stake Consensus Mechanisms for Future Blockchain Networks: Fundamentals, Applications and Opportunities

© 2013 IEEE. The rapid development of blockchain technology and their numerous emerging applications has received huge attention in recent years. The distributed consensus mechanism is the backbone of a blockchain network. It plays a key role in ensuring the network's security, integrity, and performance. Most current blockchain networks have been deploying the proof-of-work consensus mechanisms, in which the consensus is reached through intensive mining processes. However, this mechanism has several limitations, e.g., energy inefficiency, delay, and vulnerable to security threats. To overcome these problems, a new consensus mechanism has been developed recently, namely proof of stake, which enables to achieve the consensus via proving the stake ownership. This mechanism is expected to become a cutting-edge technology for future blockchain networks. This paper is dedicated to investigating proof-of-stake mechanisms, from fundamental knowledge to advanced proof-of-stake-based protocols along with performance analysis, e.g., energy consumption, delay, and security, as well as their promising applications, particularly in the field of Internet of Vehicles. The formation of stake pools and their effects on the network stake distribution are also analyzed and simulated. The results show that the ratio between the block reward and the total network stake has a significant impact on the decentralization of the network. Technical challenges and potential solutions are also discussed