Secure multi-constrained QoS reliable routing algorithm for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs)

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University LondonVehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are a particular form of wireless network made by vehicles communicating among themselves and with roadside base stations. A wide range of services has been developed for VANETs ranging from safety to infotainment applications. A key requirement for such services is that they are offered with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees in terms of service reliability and availability. Furthermore, due to the openness of VANET’s wireless channels to both internal and external attacks, the application of security mechanisms is mandatory to protect the offered QoS guarantees. QoS routing plays an essential role in identifying routes that meet the QoS requirements of the offered service over VANETs. However, searching for feasible routes subject to multiple QoS constraints is in general an NP-hard problem. Moreover, routing reliability needs to be given special attention as communication links frequently break in VANETs. To date, most existing QoS routing algorithms are designed for stable networks without considering the security of the routing process. Therefore, they are not suitable for applications in VANETs. In this thesis, the above issues are addressed firstly by developing a link reliability model based on the topological and mathematical properties of vehicular movements and velocities. Evolving graph theory is then utilised to model the VANET communication graph and integrate the developed link reliability model into it. Based on the resulting extended evolving graph model, the most reliable route in the network is picked. Secondly, the situational awareness model is applied to the developed reliable routing process because picking the most reliable route does not guarantee reliable transmission. Therefore, a situation-aware reliable multipath routing algorithm for VANETs is proposed. Thirdly, the Ant Colony Optimisation (ACO) technique is employed to propose an Ant-based multi-constrained QoS (AMCQ) routing algorithm for VANETs. AMCQ is designed to give significant advantages to the implementation of security mechanisms that are intended to protect the QoS routing process. Finally, a novel set of security procedures is proposed to defend the routing process against external and internal threats. Simulation results demonstrate that high levels of QoS can be still guaranteed by AMCQ even when the security procedures are applied

Driving with Sharks: Rethinking Connected Vehicles with Vehicle Cyber Security

In a public service announcement on March 17, 2016, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) jointly with the Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, released a warning over the increasing vulnerability of motor vehicles to remote exploits . Engine shutdown, disable brakes and door locks are few examples of the possible vehicle cyber security attacks. Modern cars grow into a new target for cyberattacks as they become increasingly connected. While driving on the road, sharks (i.e., hackers) only need to be within communication range of your vehicle to attack it. However, in some cases, they can hack into it while they are miles away. In this article, we aim to illuminate the latest vehicle cyber security threats including malware attacks, On-Board Diagnostic (OBD) vulnerabilities, and auto mobile apps threats. We illustrate the In-Vehicle network architecture and demonstrate the latest defending mechanisms that are designed to mitigate such threats

Social Evolving Graph-Based Connectivity Model for Vehicular Social Networks

Over the last two decades, social networking over the Internet has attracted the attention of millions of users and becomes a new factor that drives business intelligence and economic growth worldwide. People have strong social instincts and they tend to socialise and communicate with each other in every possible scenario thus, social networks have been extended to different types and forms beyond the Internet. Mobile Social Networks (MSN) represent a new form of social networks that take advantage of the close proximity and the unique features offered by mobile devices to establish social links among mobile users. More recently, Vehicular Social Networks (VSN), a special type of MSNs, have emerged as a new communication paradigm for social networking on the roads. VSNs are decentralised opportunistic communication networks formed among vehicles (Vegni and Loscri 2015), where the communication takes place in three dimensions: human to human, human to machine, and machine to machine communications. The flourish of vehicular networks development over the last decade has made the social interaction on the roads possible promising more enjoyable experience for vehicular travellers. Prior to discussing VSNs and their connectivity patterns, it is important to develop an understating of vehicular networks on one hand and the human social behaviour in VSNs from a social theory viewpoint on the other hand. Vehicular networks are characterised with high mobility and frequent network topology changes, which make the connectivity between vehicles tends to be vulnerable. On the other side, in addition to being within the communication range of each other, sharing the same social interests and/or characteristics is a prerequisite for any two vehicles to socially interact in VSNs. This chapter is intended to present a novel social connectivity model for VSNs by utilising the evolving graph theory. First, the properties of VSNs are briefly introduced in the context of vehicular networks. The social metrics of the communicating vehicles are then reviewed using the concepts of social theory along with the conventional connectivity metrics in vehicular networks. Thereafter, a novel social evolving graph-based connectivity model that considers both social and conventional metrics of the communicating vehicles is developed using an extended version of the evolving graph. Moreover, the proposed connectivity model suggests new social links with vehicles that enter the communication area of other vehicles with similar social interests. Finally, the developed connectivity model is investigated in a highway scenario to demonstrate its abilities in capturing the evolving characteristics of social interactions among vehicles and selecting the best paths to forward data. Data forwarding decisions are made based on a combination of social and communication metrics of the communicating vehicles. Simulation results showed that the proposed connectivity model facilitates the social interactions among vehicles and is able to establish reliable social paths among the communicating vehicles

Secure and Privacy-Aware Cloud-Assisted Video Reporting Service in 5G Enabled Vehicular Networks

Vehicular networks are one of the main technologies that will be leveraged by the arrival of the future fifth generation (5G) mobile cellular networks. While scalability and latency are the major drawbacks of IEEE 802.11p and 4G LTE enabled vehicular communications, respectively, the 5G technology is a promising solution to empower the real-time services offered by vehicular networks. However, the security and privacy of such services in 5G enabled vehicular networks need to be addressed first. In this paper, we propose a novel system model for a 5G enabled vehicular network that facilitates a reliable, secure and privacy-aware real-time video reporting service. This service is designed for the participating vehicles to instantly report the videos of traffic accidents to guarantee a timely response from official and/or ambulance vehicles toward accidents. While it provides strong security and privacy guarantees for the participating vehicle’s identity and the video contents, the proposed service ensures traceability of misbehaving participants through a cooperation scheme among different authorities. We show the feasibility and the fulfilment of the proposed reporting service in 5G enabled vehicular networks in terms of security, privacy and efficiency

Secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 protocol for vehicle-to-grid networks

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new communication paradigm between Electric Vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG). In order to ensure seamless communications between mobile EVs and the electric vehicle supply equipment, the support of ubiquitous and transparent mobile IP communications is essential in V2G networks. However, enabling mobile IP communications raises real concerns about the possibility of tracking the locations of connected EVs through their mobile IP addresses. In this paper, we employ certificate-less public key cryptography in synergy with the restrictive partially blind signature technique to construct a secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 (SP-PMIPv6) protocol for V2G networks. SP-PMIPv6 achieves low authentication latency while protecting the identity and location privacy of the mobile EV. We evaluate the SP-PMIPv6 protocol in terms of its authentication overhead and the information-theoretic uncertainty derived by the mutual information metric to show the high level of achieved anonymity

Secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 protocol for vehicle-to-grid networks

Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks have emerged as a new communication paradigm between Electric Vehicles (EVs) and the Smart Grid (SG). In order to ensure seamless communications between mobile EVs and the electric vehicle supply equipment, the support of ubiquitous and transparent mobile IP communications is essential in V2G networks. However, enabling mobile IP communications raises real concerns about the possibility of tracking the locations of connected EVs through their mobile IP addresses. In this paper, we employ certificate-less public key cryptography in synergy with the restrictive partially blind signature technique to construct a secure and privacy-aware proxy mobile IPv6 (SP-PMIPv6) protocol for V2G networks. SP-PMIPv6 achieves low authentication latency while protecting the identity and location privacy of the mobile EV. We evaluate the SP-PMIPv6 protocol in terms of its authentication overhead and the information-theoretic uncertainty derived by the mutual information metric to show the high level of achieved anonymity

Towards Anycasting-driven Reservation System for Electric Vehicle Battery Switch Service

Electro-Mobility has become an increasingly important research problem in urban city. Due to the limited electricity of battery, Electric Vehicle (EV) drivers may experience discomfort for long charging waiting time. Different from plug-in charging technology, we investigate the battery switch technology to improve EV drivers’ comfort (e.g., reduce the service waiting time from tens of minutes to a few minutes), by benefiting from switchable (fully-recharged) batteries cycled at Charging Stations (CSs). Since demand hotspot may still happen at CSs (e.g., running out of switchable batteries), incoming EVs may wait additional time to get their battery switched, and thus the EV driver’s comfort is degraded. Firstly, we propose a centralized reservation enabling service, considering EVs’ reservations (including arrival time, expected charging time of their batteries to be depleted) to optimally coordinate their battery switch plans. Secondly, a decentralized system is further proposed, by facilitating the Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) anycasting to deliver EV’s reservations. This helps to address some of the privacy issues that can be materialized in centralized system and reduce communication cost (e.g., through cellular network for reservation making). Results under the Helsinki city scenario show a trade-off between comparable performance (e.g., service waiting time, number of switched batteries) and cellular network cost for EVs’ reservations delivery

Efficient, Secure and Privacy-Preserving PMIPv6 Protocol for V2G Networks

To ensure seamless communications between mobile Electric Vehicles (EVs) and EV power supply equipment, support for ubiquitous and transparent mobile IP communications is essential in Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) networks. However, it initiates a range of privacy-related challenges as it is possible to track connected EVs through their mobile IP addresses. Recent works are mostly dedicated to solving authentication and privacy issues in V2G networks in general. Yet, they do not tackle the security and privacy challenges resulting from enabling mobile IP communications. To address these challenges, this paper proposes an Efficient, Secure and Privacy-preserving Proxy Mobile IPv6 (ESP-PMIPv6) protocol for the protection of mobile IP communications in V2G networks. ESP-PMIPv6 enables authorised EVs to acquire a mobile IPv6 address and access the V2G network in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. While ESP-PMIPv6 offers mutual authentication, identity anonymity and location unlinkability for the mobile EVs, it also achieves authorised traceability of misbehaving EVs through a novel collaborative tracking scheme. Formal and informal security analyses are conducted to prove that ESP-PMIPv6 meets these security and privacy goals. In addition, via a simulated assessment, the ESP-PMIPv6 is proven to achieve low authentication latency, low handover delay, and low packet loss rate in comparison with the PMIPv6 protocol

A centralised Wi-Fi management framework for D2D communications in dense Wi-Fi networks

In Wi-Fi networks, Device-to-Device (D2D) communications aim to improve the efficiency of the network by supporting direct communication between users in close proximity. However, in a congested Wi-Fi network, establishing D2D connections through a locally managed self-organising approach will intensify the congestion and reduce the scalability of the solution. Therefore, a centralised management approach must be involved in orchestrating those actions to guarantee the sufficiency of D2D communications. In this paper, we propose a novel management framework for D2D communications in dense Wi-Fi networks. The proposed framework employs a Software-Defined Networking (SDN) based centralised controller in synergy with a novel Access Point (AP) channel assignment process. This framework is designed to proactively establish and manage D2D connections in Wi-Fi networks considering the available radio resources and the effect of the subsequent interference. Thus, improving the overall performance of the network and providing users with higher data rate. Through simulation, we validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework and demonstrate how D2D deployment considerably improves the Wi-Fi network efficiency especially when the data rate requirements are high. Furthermore, we show that our proposed framework achieves better performance than the widely deployed Least Congested Channel selection strategy (LCC)

An evolving graph-based reliable routing scheme for VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a special form of wireless networks made by vehicles communicating among themselves on roads. The conventional routing protocols proposed for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) work poorly in VANETs. As communication links breakmore frequently in VANETs than in MANETs, the routing reliability of such highly dynamic networks needs to be paid special attention. To date, very little research has focused on the routing reliability of VANETs on highways. In this paper, we use the evolving graph theory to model the VANET communication graph on a highway. The extended evolving graph helps capture the evolving characteristics of the vehicular network topology and determines the reliable routes preemptively. This paper is the first to propose an evolving graph-based reliable routing scheme for VANETs to facilitate quality-of-service (QoS) support in the routing process. A new algorithm is developed to find the most reliable route in the VANET evolving graph from the source to the destination. We demonstrate, through the simulation results, that our proposed scheme significantly outperforms the related protocols in the literature