Secure and Authenticated Message Dissemination in Vehicular ad hoc Networks and an Incentive-Based Architecture for Vehicular Cloud

Vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs) allow vehicles to form a self-organized network. VANETs are likely to be widely deployed in the future, given the interest shown by industry in self-driving cars and satisfying their customers various interests. Problems related to Mobile ad hoc Networks (MANETs) such as routing, security, etc.have been extensively studied. Even though VANETs are special type of MANETs, solutions proposed for MANETs cannot be directly applied to VANETs because all problems related to MANETs have been studied for small networks. Moreover, in MANETs, nodes can move randomly. On the other hand, movement of nodes in VANETs are constrained to roads and the number of nodes in VANETs is large and covers typically large area. The following are the contributions of the thesis. Secure, authenticated, privacy preserving message dissemination in VANETs: When vehicles in VANET observe phenomena such as accidents, icy road condition, etc., they need to disseminate this information to vehicles in appropriate areas so the drivers of those vehicles can take appropriate action. When such messages are disseminated, the authenticity of the vehicles disseminating such messages should be verified while at the same time the anonymity of the vehicles should be preserved. Moreover, to punish the vehicles spreading malicious messages, authorities should be able to trace such messages to their senders when necessary. For this, we present an efficient protocol for the dissemination of authenticated messages. Incentive-based architecture for vehicular cloud: Due to the advantages such as exibility and availability, interest in cloud computing has gained lot of attention in recent years. Allowing vehicles in VANETs to store the collected information in the cloud would facilitate other vehicles to retrieve this information when they need. In this thesis, we present a secure incentive-based architecture for vehicular cloud. Our architecture allows vehicles to collect and store information in the cloud; it also provides a mechanism for rewarding vehicles that contributing to the cloud. Privacy preserving message dissemination in VANETs: Sometimes, it is sufficient to ensure the anonymity of the vehicles disseminating messages in VANETs. We present a privacy preserving message dissemination protocol for VANETs

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

Cloud Computing in VANETs: Architecture, Taxonomy, and Challenges

Cloud Computing in VANETs (CC-V) has been investigated into two major themes of research including Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) and Vehicle using Cloud (VuC). VCC is the realization of autonomous cloud among vehicles to share their abundant resources. VuC is the efficient usage of conventional cloud by on-road vehicles via a reliable Internet connection. Recently, number of advancements have been made to address the issues and challenges in VCC and VuC. This paper qualitatively reviews CC-V with the emphasis on layered architecture, network component, taxonomy, and future challenges. Specifically, a four-layered architecture for CC-V is proposed including perception, co-ordination, artificial intelligence and smart application layers. Three network component of CC-V namely, vehicle, connection and computation are explored with their cooperative roles. A taxonomy for CC-V is presented considering major themes of research in the area including design of architecture, data dissemination, security, and applications. Related literature on each theme are critically investigated with comparative assessment of recent advances. Finally, some open research challenges are identified as future issues. The challenges are the outcome of the critical and qualitative assessment of literature on CC-V