Secure Authentication and Privacy-Preserving Techniques in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs)

In the last decade, there has been growing interest in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETworks (VANETs). Today car manufacturers have already started to equip vehicles with sophisticated sensors that can provide many assistive features such as front collision avoidance, automatic lane tracking, partial autonomous driving, suggestive lane changing, and so on. Such technological advancements are enabling the adoption of VANETs not only to provide safer and more comfortable driving experience but also provide many other useful services to the driver as well as passengers of a vehicle. However, privacy, authentication and secure message dissemination are some of the main issues that need to be thoroughly addressed and solved for the widespread adoption/deployment of VANETs. Given the importance of these issues, researchers have spent a lot of effort in these areas over the last decade. We present an overview of the following issues that arise in VANETs: privacy, authentication, and secure message dissemination. Then we present a comprehensive review of various solutions proposed in the last 10 years which address these issues. Our survey sheds light on some open issues that need to be addressed in the future

Protocols and Architecture for Privacy-preserving Authentication and Secure Message Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

The rapid development in the automotive industry and wireless communication technologies have enhanced the popularity of Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Today, the automobile industry is developing sophisticated sensors that can provide a wide range of assistive features, including accident avoidance, automatic lane tracking, semi-autonomous driving, suggested lane changes, and more. VANETs can provide drivers a safer and more comfortable driving experience, as well as many other useful services by leveraging such technological advancements. Even though this networking technology enables smart and autonomous driving, it also introduces a plethora of attack vectors. However, the main issues to be sorted out and addressed for the widespread deployment/adoption of VANETs are privacy, authenticating users, and the distribution of secure messages. These issues have been addressed in this dissertation, and the contributions of this dissertation are summarized as follows: Secure and privacy-preserving authentication and message dissemination in VANETs: Attackers can compromise the messages disseminated within VANETs by tampering with the message content or sending malicious messages. Therefore, it is crucial to ensure the legitimacy of the vehicles participating in the VANETs as well as the integrity and authenticity of the messages transmitted in VANETs. In VANET communication, the vehicle uses pseudonyms instead of its real identity to protect its privacy. However, the real identity of a vehicle must be revealed when it is determined to be malicious. This dissertation presents a distributed and scalable privacy-preserving authentication and message dissemination scheme in VANET. Low overhead privacy-preserving authentication scheme in VANETs: The traditional pseudonym-based authentication scheme uses Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs) to store the certificates of revoked and malicious entities in VANETs. However, the size of CRL increases significantly with the increased number of revoked entities. Therefore, the overhead involved in maintaining the revoked certificates is overwhelming in CRL-based solutions. This dissertation presents a lightweight privacy-preserving authentication scheme that reduces the overhead associated with maintaining CRLs in VANETs. Our scheme also provides an efficient look-up operation for CRLs. Efficient management of pseudonyms for privacy-preserving authentication in VANETs: In VANETs, vehicles change pseudonyms frequently to avoid the traceability of attackers. However, if only one vehicle out of 100 vehicles changes its pseudonym, an intruder can easily breach the privacy of the vehicle by linking the old and new pseudonym. This dissertation presents an efficient method for managing pseudonyms of vehicles. In our scheme, vehicles within the same region simultaneously change their pseudonyms to reduce the chance of linking two pseudonyms to the same vehicle

An attribute-based framework for secure communications in vehicular ad hoc networks

In this paper, we introduce an attribute-based framework to achieve secure communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which enjoys several advantageous features. The proposed framework employs attribute-based signature (ABS) to achieve message authentication and integrity and protect vehicle privacy, which greatly mitigates the overhead caused by pseudonym/private key change or update in the existing solutions for VANETs based on symmetric key, asymmetric key, and identity-based cryptography and group signature. In addition, we extend a standard ABS scheme with traceability and revocation mechanisms and seamlessly integrate them into the proposed framework to support vehicle traceability and revocation by a trusted authority, and thus, the resulting scheme for vehicular communications does not suffer from the anonymity misuse issue, which has been a challenge for anonymous credential-based vehicular protocols. Finally, we implement the proposed ABS scheme using a rapid prototyping tool called Charm to evaluate its performance

Secure Authentication Mechanism for Cluster based Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET): A Survey

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) play a crucial role in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) by facilitating communication between vehicles and infrastructure. This communication aims to enhance road safety, improve traffic efficiency, and enhance passenger comfort. The secure and reliable exchange of information is paramount to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data, while the authentication of vehicles and messages is essential to prevent unauthorized access and malicious activities. This survey paper presents a comprehensive analysis of existing authentication mechanisms proposed for cluster-based VANETs. The strengths, weaknesses, and suitability of these mechanisms for various scenarios are carefully examined. Additionally, the integration of secure key management techniques is discussed to enhance the overall authentication process. Cluster-based VANETs are formed by dividing the network into smaller groups or clusters, with designated cluster heads comprising one or more vehicles. Furthermore, this paper identifies gaps in the existing literature through an exploration of previous surveys. Several schemes based on different methods are critically evaluated, considering factors such as throughput, detection rate, security, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay. To provide optimal solutions for authentication in cluster-based VANETs, this paper highlights AI- and ML-based routing-based schemes. These approaches leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to enhance authentication within the cluster-based VANET network. Finally, this paper explores the open research challenges that exist in the realm of authentication for cluster-based Vehicular Adhoc Networks, shedding light on areas that require further investigation and development

Towards Cyber Security for Low-Carbon Transportation: Overview, Challenges and Future Directions

In recent years, low-carbon transportation has become an indispensable part as sustainable development strategies of various countries, and plays a very important responsibility in promoting low-carbon cities. However, the security of low-carbon transportation has been threatened from various ways. For example, denial of service attacks pose a great threat to the electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid networks. To minimize these threats, several methods have been proposed to defense against them. Yet, these methods are only for certain types of scenarios or attacks. Therefore, this review addresses security aspect from holistic view, provides the overview, challenges and future directions of cyber security technologies in low-carbon transportation. Firstly, based on the concept and importance of low-carbon transportation, this review positions the low-carbon transportation services. Then, with the perspective of network architecture and communication mode, this review classifies its typical attack risks. The corresponding defense technologies and relevant security suggestions are further reviewed from perspective of data security, network management security and network application security. Finally, in view of the long term development of low-carbon transportation, future research directions have been concerned.Comment: 34 pages, 6 figures, accepted by journal Renewable and Sustainable Energy Review

A transparent distributed ledger-based certificate revocation scheme for VANETs

The widespread adoption of Cooperative, Connected, and Automated Mobility (CCAM) applications requires the implementation of stringent security mechanisms to minimize the surface of cyber attacks. Authentication is an effective process for validating user identity in vehicular networks. However, authentication alone is not enough to prevent dangerous attack situations. Existing security mechanisms are not able to promptly revoke the credentials of misbehaving vehicles, thus tolerate malicious actors to remain trusted in the system for a long time. The resulting vulnerability window allows the implementation of complex attacks, thus posing a substantial impairment to the security of the vehicular ecosystem. In this paper we propose a Distributed Ledger-based Vehicular Revocation Scheme that improves the state of the art by providing a vulnerability window lower than 1 s, reducing well-behaved vehicles exposure to sophisticated and potentially dangerous attacks. The proposed scheme harnesses the advantages of the underlying Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to implement a privacy-aware revocation process while being fully transparent to all participating entities. Furthermore, it meets the critical message processing times defined by EU and US standards, thus closing a critical gap in the current international standards. Theoretical analysis and experimental validation demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme, where DLT streamlines the revocation operation overhead and delivers an economically viable yet scalable solution against cyber attacks on vehicular systems

Information management and security protection for internet of vehicles

Considering the huge number of vehicles on the roads, the Internet of Vehicles is envisioned to foster a variety of new applications ranging from road safety enhancement to mobile entertainment. These new applications all face critical challenges which are how to handle a large volume of data streams of various kinds and how the secure architecture enhances the security of the Internet of Vehicles systems. This dissertation proposes a comprehensive message routing solution to provide the fundamental support of information management for the Internet of Vehicles. The proposed approach delivers messages via a self-organized moving-zone-based architecture formed using pure vehicle-to-vehicle communication and integrates moving object modeling and indexing techniques to vehicle management. It can significantly reduce the communication overhead while providing higher delivery rates. To ensure the identity and location privacy of the vehicles on the Internet of Vehicles environment, a highly efficient randomized authentication protocol, RAU+ is proposed to leverage homomorphic encryption and enable individual vehicles to easily generate a new randomized identity for each newly established communication while each authentication server would not know their real identities. In this way, not any single party can track the user. To minimize the infrastructure reliance, this dissertation further proposes a secure and lightweight identity management mechanism in which vehicles only need to contact a central authority once to obtain a global identity. Vehicles take turns serving as the captain authentication unit in self-organized groups. The local identities are computed from the vehicle's global identity and do not reveal true identities. Extensive experiments are conducted under a variety of Internet of Vehicles environments. The experimental results demonstrate the practicality, effectiveness, and efficiency of the proposed protocols.Includes bibliographical references