Security and privacy will play a pivotal role in the commercialization of Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs). Traditionally, both cryptographic and non-cryptographic approaches have been used by researchers to address security and privacy issues and achieve secure Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) applications. However, some security goals such as trust and reputation, are still hard to achieve through conventional cryptographic approaches. Trust is the degree of certainty with which the received information is accepted and acted upon. Historically trust has been computed for both the content generator and the content itself with former known as entity trust and the latter known as data trust. Both entity and content trust are equally important to support trustworthy communication in VANET. We review, analyze, and compare some of the recently proposed trust establishment and management mechanisms (from 2014 to 2019) in vehicular networks. Furthermore, we also discuss the weaknesses and inadequacies of existing trust establishment and management approaches when deployed in a VANET environment. Finally, we discuss some future challenges that will need to be addressed for trustworthy communications in vehicular networks.

Trust in VANET: A Survey of Current Solutions and Future Research Opportunities

Geographic routing has been widely studied over the years as an effective solution for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), especially because of the availability of wireless devices and global positioning system services. Given the unpredictable behavior of VANETs, selecting the next relay node has been proved a very challenging task. Therefore, in order to maintain acceptable network performance, the routing algorithm needs to be carefully designed to adapt to the fast network changes. The Geographic Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) protocol is a widely adopted position-based routing protocol for VANETs, which makes it a good benchmark candidate. In this paper, we analyze the shortcomings of GPSR and propose a new strategy named Path Aware GPSR (PA-GPSR), which includes additional extension tables in the Neighbors' Table to select the best path and bypass the nodes that have delivered such previous packets in recovery mode. Moreover, our proposed algorithm can eliminate packet routing loops avoiding the delivery of the same packet to the same neighbor node. These PA-GPSR features can, for instance, help to overcome link-breakage due to the unavoidable reasons, such as road accidents or dead-end roads. We used the Simulation of Urban MObility (SUMO) and Network Simulator-version 3 (NS-3) platform to compare our proposed algorithm to the traditional GPSR and Maxduration-Minangle GPSR (MM-GPSR) in scenarios varying the number of nodes as well as the number of source-destination pairs. Our results show that the proposed PA-GPSR strategy performed better than the traditional GPSR and MM-GPSR when packet loss rate, end-to-end delay, and network yield are considered as performance metrics.

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Improvement and performance evaluation of GPSR-based routing techniques for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are a special type of wireless ad hoc network that requires highly scalable routing strategies to establishing reliable end-to-end communication. Because of the high dynamic of VANETs, the mobility of vehicle nodes increases the control traffic overhead. Accordingly, establishing reliable end-to-end communication paths depends entirely on the routing mechanism and the type of nodes mobility information. In this paper, we propose a new improvement to the mechanism of the Optimized Link State Routing Protocol(OLSR) protocol, named Cluster-based Adept Cooperative Algorithm (CACA), where each vehicle estimate a reliable low-overhead path using the cluster-based QoS algorithm. The CACA algorithm is introduced to improve the ability of the MPR scheme for maintaining long-lived routes. Moreover, the network scalability is enhanced by adaptively selecting most sustainable paths based on a signal strength beacon and the mobility degree of a node, which reduces significantly minimizes the size of control messages overhead as well the routing tables recalculation process. Simulation experiments using the network simulator are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution. The results show that the proposed algorithm can improve network performance effectively relative to other algorithms.

/pdf/an-adaptive-relay-selection-scheme-for-enhancing-network-4pfl5jkhwm.pdf

An Adaptive Relay Selection Scheme for Enhancing Network Stability in VANETs

FELIDS: Federated learning-based intrusion detection system for agricultural Internet of Things

Blockchain in healthcare

Healthcare professionals and scholars have emphasized the need for IoT-based remote health monitoring services to track the health of the elderly. Such systems produce a large amount of data, necessitating the security and privacy of that data. On the other hand, Software Defined Networking (SDN) integration could be seen as a good solution to guarantee both flexibility and efficiency of the network which is even more important in the case of healthcare monitoring. Furthermore, Blockchain has recently been proposed as a game-changing tool that can be integrated into the Internet of Things (IoT) to have the optimal level of security and privacy. However, incorporating Blockchain into IoT networks, which rely heavily on patients’ health sensors, is extremely difficult. In this paper, a secure Healthcare Monitoring System (HMS) is proposed with a focus on trust management issues. The architecture seeks to protect multiple healthcare monitoring system components and preserves patient privacy by developing a security interface where separate security modules can be integrated to run side by side to ensure reliable HMS. The security framework architecture we propose takes advantage of the blockchain technology as a secure and timely information back-end. STHM is a proposal that uses Software-Defined Networking (SDN) as the communication medium that allows users to access SDN’s different functional and security technologies and services. Simulation results show that the use of Blockchain for the SDN-based healthcare monitoring can ensure the desired flexibility and security for a very lightweight additional overhead.

https://www.mdpi.com/2079-9292/10/15/1787/pdf

STHM: A Secured and Trusted Healthcare Monitoring Architecture Using SDN and Blockchain

Considered as a primordial component of Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS), Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) plays a weighty role to facilitate different on-road applications, most of which primary rely on multi hop communications. To ensure reliability and security of such communication, it is very pertinent to guarantee that the most proper and trustworthy vehicles are selected as relays. This paper takes up this challenge by introducing a weighted probabilistic and trust-aware strategy called WeiSTARS, to ensure high delivery ratios within reduced delays. Simulation results conducted using NS2 tool depicted that our technique enhances the delivery ratio by more than 8% with around 30% less delay compared to both GytAR and GPSR routing protocols even in the presence of high ratios of dishonest vehicles.

WeiSTARS: A weighted trust-aware relay selection scheme for VANET

In VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork), the act of transferring important information is a main concern in every routing protocol conception. Hence, selecting next packet relay is crucial decision for the network performances. The highly dynamic topology of VANET which is result of the frequent changes in vehicles' positions, their speeds and the unpredictable drivers' directions at intersections mostly lead to wrong packet forwarding decisions. To overcome the above mentioned countermeasure, we propose in this paper a GPSR-based routing protocol incorporating weighted link quality estimation, a probabilistic reception approximation and moving direction. Based on vehicles' new coordinates and link status, our proposal called P-GPSR aims at selecting reasonable relay node to smoothly disseminate messages between vehicles. This addition allows our proposal to significantly enhance the overall GPSR performances, more specifically, the packet delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay. Simulation experiments performed using NS2 simulator have shown that our proposal outperforms both GPSR and GPSR-L in terms of throughput and packet delivery ration without negatively affecting the end-to-end delay.

Weighted Probabilistic Next-Hop Forwarder Decision-Making in VANET Environments

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with artificial intelligence (AI) have ushered in a new era of mobile edge computing (MEC). Traditional AI models based on the aggregation of UAV sensing data that mostly contain private and sensitive user data, may raise serious privacy and data misuse problems. Federated learning (FL), as a potential distributed AI paradigm, has allowed UAVs to jointly train a global model without exposing their local sensing data. In the general context, flying things communicate only local model updates. The training process ends when the global model reaches a certain threshold. The centralized curator aggregation model can be subject to diverse threats such as DDoS and single point of failure. To improve the security of FL implementation and create a privacy-preserving model, we consider a new blockchain empowered AI paradigm using both wireless miners and edge computing at flying things for security requiring heterogeneous vehicular systems. In our proposal, blockchain is the backbone allowing secure and safe data exchange between them, providing decentralized FL training without the need for a central server. The proposed architecture is apt to cope with FL privacy leakage, insider/outsider attacks, malicious opponents, inference, and poisoning. It transforms intelligent MEC systems into decentralized, secure, and privacy enhanced networks.

Sofiane Dahmane

Papers

STHM: A Secured and Trusted Healthcare Monitoring Architecture Using SDN and Blockchain

WeiSTARS: A weighted trust-aware relay selection scheme for VANET

Weighted Probabilistic Next-Hop Forwarder Decision-Making in VANET Environments

Toward a Secure Edge-Enabled and Artificially Intelligent Internet of Flying Things Using Blockchain