Assessing the Competing Characteristics of Privacy and Safety within Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The introduction of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication has the promise of decreasing vehicle collisions, congestion, and emissions. However, this technology places safety and privacy at odds; an increase of safety applications will likely result in the decrease of consumer privacy. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has proposed the Security Credential Management System (SCMS) as the back end infrastructure for maintaining, distributing, and revoking vehicle certificates attached to every Basic Safety Message (BSM). This Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) scheme is designed around the philosophy of maintaining user privacy through the separation of functions to prevent any one subcomponent from identifying users. However, because of the high precision of the data elements within each message this design cannot prevent large scale third-party BSM collection and pseudonym linking resulting in privacy loss. In addition, this philosophy creates an extraordinarily complex and heavily distributed system. In response to this difficulty, this thesis proposes a data ambiguity method to bridge privacy and safety within the context of interconnected vehicles. The objective in doing so is to preserve both Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) safety applications and consumer privacy. A Vehicular Ad-Hoc Network (VANET) metric classification is introduced that explores five fundamental pillars of VANETs. These pillars (Safety, Privacy, Cost, Efficiency, Stability) are applied to four different systems: Non-V2V environment, the aforementioned SCMS, the group-pseudonym based Vehicle Based Security System (VBSS), and VBSS with Dithering (VBSS-D) which includes the data ambiguity method of dithering. By using these evaluation criteria, the advantages and disadvantages of bringing each system to fruition is showcased

Towards a Framework for Preserving Privacy in VANET

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is envisioned as an integral part of the Intelligent Transportation Systems as it promises various services and benefits such as road safety, traffic efficiency, navigation and infotainment services. However, the security and privacy risks associated with the wireless communication are often overlooked. Messages exchanged in VANET wireless communication carry inferable Personally Identifiable Information(PII). This introduces several privacy threats that could limit the adoption of VANET. The quantification of these privacy threats is an active research area in VANET security and privacy domains. The Pseudonymisation technique is currently the most preferred solution for critical privacy threats in VANET to provide conditional anonymous authentication. In the existing literature, several Pseudonym Changing Schemes(PCS) have been proposed as effective de-identification approaches to prevent the inference of PII. However, for various reasons, none of the proposed schemes received public acceptance. Moreover, one of the open research challenges is to compare different PCSs under varying circumstances with a set of standardized experimenting parameters and consistent metrics. In this research, we propose a framework to assess the effectiveness of PCSs in VANET with a systematic approach. This comprehensive equitable framework consists of a variety of building blocks which are segmented into correlated sub-domains named Mobility Models, Adversary Models, and Privacy Metrics. Our research introduces a standard methodology to evaluate and compare VANET PCSs using a generic simulation setup to obtain optimal, realistic and most importantly, consistent results. This road map for the simulation setup aims to help the research \& development community to develop, assess and compare the PCS with standard set of parameters for proper analysis and reporting of new PCSs. The assessment of PCS should not only be equitable but also realistic and feasible. Therefore, the sub-domains of the framework need coherent as well as practically applicable characteristics. The Mobility Model is the layout of the traffic on the road which has varying features such as traffic density and traffic scenarios based on the geographical maps. A diverse range of Adversary Models is important for pragmatic evaluation of the PCSs which not only considers the presence of global passive adversary but also observes the effect of intelligent and strategic \u27local attacker\u27 placements. The biggest challenge in privacy measurement is the fact that it is a context-based evaluation. In the literature, the PCSs are evaluated using either user-oriented or adversary-oriented metrics. Under all circumstances, the PCSs should be assessed from both user and adversary perspectives. Using this framework, we determined that a local passive adversary can be strong based on the attacking capabilities. Therefore, we propose two intelligent adversary placements which help in privacy assessment with realistic adversary modelling. When the existing PCSs are assessed with our systematic approach, consistent models and metrics, we identified the privacy vulnerabilities and the limitations of existing PCSs. There was a need for comprehensive PCS which consider the context of the vehicles and the changing traffic patterns in the neighbourhood. Consequently, we developed a Context-Aware \& Traffic Based PCS that focuses on increasing the overall rate of confusion for the adversary and to reduce deterministic information regarding the pseudonym change. It is achieved by increasing the number of dynamic attributes in the proposed PCS for inference of the changing pattern of the pseudonyms. The PCS increases the anonymity of the vehicle by having the synchronized pseudonym changes. The details given under the sub-domains of the framework solidifies our findings to strengthen the privacy assessment of our proposed PCS

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

Dynamic Vehicular Routing in Urban Environments

Traffic congestion is a persistent issue that most of the people living in a city have to face every day. Traffic density is constantly increasing and, in many metropolitan areas, the road network has reached its limits and cannot easily be extended to meet the growing traffic demand. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) is a world wide trend in traffic monitoring that uses technology and infrastructure improvements in advanced communication and sensors to tackle transportation issues such as mobility efficiency, safety, and traffic congestion. The purpose of ITS is to take advantage of all available technologies to improve every aspect of mobility and traffic. Our focus in this thesis is to use these advancements in technology and infrastructure to mitigate traffic congestion. We discuss the state of the art in traffic flow optimization methods, their limitations, and the benefits of a new point of view. The traffic monitoring mechanism that we propose uses vehicular telecommunication to gather the traffic information that is fundamental to the creation of a consistent overview of the traffic situation, to provision real-time information to drivers, and to optimizing their routes. In order to study the impact of dynamic rerouting on the traffic congestion experienced in the urban environment, we need a reliable representation of the traffic situation. In this thesis, traffic flow theory, together with mobility models and propagation models, are the basis to providing a simulation environment capable of providing a realistic and interactive urban mobility, which is used to test and validate our solution for mitigating traffic congestion. The topology of the urban environment plays a fundamental role in traffic optimization, not only in terms of mobility patterns, but also in the connectivity and infrastructure available. Given the complexity of the problem, we start by defining the main parameters we want to optimize, and the user interaction required, in order to achieve the goal. We aim to optimize the travel time from origin to destination with a selfish approach, focusing on each driver. We then evaluated constraints and added values of the proposed optimization, providing a preliminary study on its impact on a simple scenario. Our evaluation is made in a best-case scenario using complete information, then in a more realistic scenario with partial information on the global traffic situation, where connectivity and coverage play a major role. The lack of a general-purpose, freely-available, realistic and dependable scenario for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) creates many problems in the research community in providing and comparing realistic results. To address these issues, we implemented a synthetic traffic scenario, based on a real city, to evaluate dynamic routing in a realistic urban environment. The Luxembourg SUMO Traffic (LuST) Scenario is based on the mobility derived from the City of Luxembourg. The scenario is built for the Simulator of Urban MObiltiy (SUMO) and it is compatible with Vehicles in Network Simulation (VEINS) and Objective Modular Network Testbed in C++ (OMNet++), allowing it to be used in VANET simulations. In this thesis we present a selfish traffic optimization approach based on dynamic rerouting, able to mitigate the impact of traffic congestion in urban environments on a global scale. The general-purpose traffic scenario built to validate our results is already being used by the research community, and is freely-available under the MIT licence, and is hosted on GitHub

Asioiden Internetin tietoturva: ratkaisuja, standardeja ja avoimia ongelmia

Internet of Things (IoT) extends the Internet to our everyday objects, which enables new kind of applications and services. These IoT applications face demanding technical challenges: the number of ‘things’ or objects can be very large, they can be very con-strained devices, and may need to operate on challenging and dynamic environments. However, the architecture of today’s Internet is based on many legacy protocols and technology that were not originally designed to support features like mobility or the huge and growing number of objects the Internet consists of today. Similarly, many security features of today’s Internet are additional layers built to fill up flaws in the un-derlying design. Fulfilling new technical requirements set by IoT applications requires efficient solutions designed for the IoT use from the ground up. Moreover, the imple-mentation of this new IoT technology requires interoperability and integration with tra-ditional Internet. Due to considerable technical challenges, the security is an often over-looked aspect in the emerging new IoT technology. This thesis surveys general security requirements for the entire field of IoT applica-tions. Out of the large amount of potential applications, this thesis focuses on two major IoT application fields: wireless sensor networks and vehicular ad-hoc networks. The thesis introduces example scenarios and presents major security challenges related to these areas. The common standards related to the areas are examined in the security perspective. The thesis also examines research work beyond the area of standardization in an attempt to find solutions to unanswered security challenges. The thesis aims to give an introduction to the security challenges in the IoT world and review the state of the security research through these two major IoT areas

Vehicle re-routing strategies for congestion avoidance

Traffic congestion causes driver frustration and costs billions of dollars annually in lost time and fuel consumption. This dissertation introduces a cost-effective and easily deployable vehicular re-routing system that reduces the effects of traffic congestion. The system collects real-time traffic data from vehicles and road-side sensors, and computes proactive, individually tailored re-routing guidance, which is pushed to vehicles when signs of congestion are observed on their routes. Subsequently, this dissertation proposes and evaluates two classes of re-routing strategies designed to be incorporated into this system, namely, Single Shortest Path strategies and Multiple Shortest Paths Strategies. These strategies are firstly implemented in a centralized system, where a server receives traffic updates from cars, computes alternative routes, and pushes them as guidance to drivers. The extensive experimental results show that the proposed strategies are capable of reducing the travel time comparable to a state-of-the-art Dynamic Traffic Assignment (DTA) algorithm, while avoiding the issues that make DTA impractical, such as lack of scalability and robustness, and high computation time. Furthermore, the variety of proposed strategies allows the system to be tuned to different levels of trade-off between re-routing effectiveness and computational efficiency. Also, the proposed traffic guidance system is robust even if many drivers ignore the guidance, or if the system adoption rate is relatively low. The centralized system suffers from two intrinsic problems: the central server has to perform intensive computation and communication with the vehicles in real-time, which can make such solutions infeasible for large regions with many vehicles; and driver privacy is not protected since the drivers have to share their location as well as the origins and destinations of their trips with the server, which may prevent the adoption of such solutions. To address these problems, a hybrid vehicular re-routing system is presented in this dissertation. The system off-loads a large part of the re-routing computation at the vehicles, and thus, the re-routing process becomes practical in real-time. To make collaborative re-routing decisions, the vehicles exchange messages over vehicular ad hoc networks. The system is hybrid because it still uses a server to determine an accurate global view of the traffic. In addition, the user privacy is balanced with the re-routing effectiveness. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with a centralized system, the proposed hybrid system increases the user privacy substantially, while the re-routing effectiveness is minimally impacted

Visible Light Communication Cyber Security Vulnerabilities For Indoor And Outdoor Vehicle-To-Vehicle Communication

Light fidelity (Li-Fi), developed from the approach of Visible Light Communication (VLC), is a great replacement or complement to existing radio frequency-based (RF) networks. Li-Fi is expected to be deployed in various environments were, due to Wi-Fi congestion and health limitations, RF should not be used. Moreover, VLC can provide the future fifth generation (5G) wireless technology with higher data rates for device connectivity which will alleviate the traffic demand. 5G is playing a vital role in encouraging the modern applications. In 2023, the deployment of all the cellular networks will reach more than 5 billion users globally. As a result, the security and privacy of 5G wireless networks is an essential problem as those modern applications are in people\u27s life everywhere. VLC security is as one of the core physical-layer security (PLS) solutions for 5G networks. Due to the fact that light does not penetrate through solid objects or walls, VLC naturally has higher security and privacy for indoor wireless networks compared to RF networks. However, the broadcasting nature of VLC caused concerns, e.g., eavesdropping, have created serious attention as it is a crucial step to validate the success of VLC in wild. The aim of this thesis is to properly address the security issues of VLC and further enhance the VLC nature security. We analyzed the secrecy performance of a VLC model by studying the characteristics of the transmitter, receiver and the visible light channel. Moreover, we mitigated the security threats in the VLC model for the legitimate user, by 1) implementing more access points (APs) in a multiuser VLC network that are cooperated, 2) reducing the semi-angle of LED to help improve the directivity and secrecy and, 3) using the protected zone strategy around the AP where eavesdroppers are restricted. According to the model\u27s parameters, the results showed that the secrecy performance in the proposed indoor VLC model and the vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) VLC outdoor model using a combination of multiple PLS techniques as beamforming, secure communication zones, and friendly jamming is enhanced. The proposed model security performance was measured with respect to the signal to noise ratio (SNR), received optical power, and bit error rate (BER) Matlab simulation results

State of the Art and Future Perspectives in Smart and Sustainable Urban Development

This book contributes to the conceptual and practical knowledge pools in order to improve the research and practice on smart and sustainable urban development by presenting an informed understanding of the subject to scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. This book presents contributions—in the form of research articles, literature reviews, case reports, and short communications—offering insights into the smart and sustainable urban development by conducting in-depth conceptual debates, detailed case study descriptions, thorough empirical investigations, systematic literature reviews, or forecasting analyses. This way, the book forms a repository of relevant information, material, and knowledge to support research, policymaking, practice, and the transferability of experiences to address urbanization and other planetary challenges