With the emergence of ever-growing advanced vehicular applications, the challenges to meet the demands from both communication and computation are increasingly prominent. Without powerful communication and computational support, various vehicular applications and services will still stay in the concept phase and cannot be put into practice in the daily life. Thus, solving this problem is of great importance. The existing solutions, such as cellular networks, roadside units (RSUs), and mobile cloud computing, are far from perfect because they highly depend on and bear the cost of additional infrastructure deployment. Given tremendous number of vehicles in urban areas, putting these underutilized vehicular resources into use offers great opportunity and value. Therefore, we conceive the idea of utilizing vehicles as the infrastructures for communication and computation, named vehicular fog computing (VFC), which is an architecture that utilizes a collaborative multitude of end-user clients or near-user edge devices to carry out communication and computation, based on better utilization of individual communication and computational resources of each vehicle. By aggregating abundant resources of individual vehicles, the quality of services and applications can be enhanced greatly. In particular, by discussing four types of scenarios of moving and parked vehicles as the communication and computational infrastructures, we carry on a quantitative analysis of the capacities of VFC. We unveil an interesting relationship among the communication capability, connectivity, and mobility of vehicles, and we also find out the characteristics about the pattern of parking behavior, which benefits from the understanding of utilizing the vehicular resources. Finally, we discuss the challenges and open problems in implementing the proposed VFC system as the infrastructures. Our study provides insights for this novel promising paradigm, as well as research topics about vehicular information infrastructures.

Vehicular Fog Computing: A Viewpoint of Vehicles as the Infrastructures

In this paper, we introduce an efficient conditional privacy preservation (ECPP) protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to address the issue on anonymous authentication for safety messages with authority traceability. The proposed protocol is characterized by the generation of on-the-fly short-time anonymous keys between on-board units (OBUs) and roadside units (RSUs), which can provide fast anonymous authentication and privacy tracking while minimizing the required storage for short-time anonymous keys. We demonstrate the merits gained by the proposed protocol through extensive analysis.

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ECPP: Efficient Conditional Privacy Preservation Protocol for Secure Vehicular Communications

By broadcasting messages about traffic status to vehicles wirelessly, a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can improve traffic safety and efficiency. To guarantee secure communication in VANETs, security and privacy issues must be addressed before their deployment. The conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) scheme is suitable for solving security and privacy-preserving problems in VANETs, because it supports both mutual authentication and privacy protection simultaneously. Many identity-based CPPA schemes for VANETs using bilinear pairings have been proposed over the last few years to enhance security or to improve performance. However, it is well known that the bilinear pairing operation is one of the most complex operations in modern cryptography. To achieve better performance and reduce computational complexity of information processing in VANET, the design of a CPPA scheme for the VANET environment that does not use bilinear paring becomes a challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a CPPA scheme for VANETs that does not use bilinear paring and we demonstrate that it could supports both the mutual authentication and the privacy protection simultaneously. Our proposed CPPA scheme retains most of the benefits obtained with the previously proposed CPPA schemes. Moreover, the proposed CPPA scheme yields a better performance in terms of computation cost and communication cost making it be suitable for use by the VANET safety-related applications.

An Efficient Identity-Based Conditional Privacy-Preserving Authentication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

With the adoption of state-of-the-art telecommunication technologies for sensing and collecting traffic related information, Vehicular Sensor Networks (VSNs) have emerged as a new application scenario that is envisioned to revolutionize the human driving experiences and traffic flow control systems. To avoid any possible malicious attack and resource abuse, employing a digital signature scheme is widely recognized as the most effective approach for VSNs to achieve authentication, integrity, and validity. However, when the number of signatures received by a Roadside Unit (RSU) becomes large, a scalability problem emerges immediately, where the RSU could be difficult to sequentially verify each received signature within 300 ms interval according to the current Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) broadcast protocol. In this paper, we introduce an efficient batch signature verification scheme for communications between vehicles and RSUs (or termed vehicle- to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications), in which an RSU can verify multiple received signatures at the same time such that the total verification time can be dramatically reduced. We demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve conditional privacy preservation that is essential in VSNs, where each message launched by a vehicle is mapped to a distinct pseudo identity, while a trust authority can always retrieve the real identity of a vehicle from any pseudo identity. With the proposed scheme, since identity-based cryptography is employed in generating private keys for pseudo identities, certificates are not needed and thus transmission overhead can be significantly reduced.

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An Efficient Identity-Based Batch Verification Scheme for Vehicular Sensor Networks

The Internet of Things is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous computing service, requiring huge volumes of data storage and processing. Unfortunately, due to the unique characteristics of resource constraints, self-organization, and shortrange communication in IoT, it always resorts to the cloud for outsourced storage and computation, which has brought about a series of new challenging security and privacy threats. In this article, we introduce the architecture and unique security and privacy requirements for the next generation mobile technologies on cloud-based IoT, identify the inappropriateness of most existing work, and address the challenging issues of secure packet forwarding and efficient privacy preserving authentication by proposing new efficient privacy preserving data aggregation without public key homomorphic encryption. Finally, several interesting open problems are suggested with promising ideas to trigger more research efforts in this emerging area.

Security and Privacy for Cloud-Based IoT: Challenges

In this paper, we first identify some unique design requirements in the aspects of security and privacy preservation for communications between different communication devices in vehicular ad hoc networks. We then propose a secure and privacy-preserving protocol based on group signature and identity (ID)-based signature techniques. We demonstrate that the proposed protocol cannot only guarantee the requirements of security and privacy but can also provide the desired traceability of each vehicle in the case where the ID of the message sender has to be revealed by the authority for any dispute event. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify the efficiency, effectiveness, and applicability of the proposed protocol in various application scenarios under different road systems.

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GSIS: A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Vehicular Communications

In this paper, we propose a timed efficient and secure vehicular communication (TSVC) scheme with privacy preservation, which aims at minimizing the packet overhead in terms of signature overhead and signature verification latency without compromising the security and privacy requirements. Compared with currently existing public key based packet authentication schemes for security and privacy, the communication and computation overhead of TSVC can be significantly reduced due to the short message authentication code (MAC) tag attached in each packet for the packet authentication, by which only a fast hash operation is required to verify each packet. Simulation results demonstrate that TSVC maintains acceptable packet latency with much less packet overhead, while significantly reducing the packet loss ratio compared with that of the existing public key infrastructure (PKI) based schemes, especially when the road traffic is heavy.

TSVC: timed efficient and secure vehicular communications with privacy preserving

Vehicular communication networking is a promising approach of facilitating road safety, traffic management, and infotainment dissemination for drivers and passengers. However, it is subject to various malicious abuses and security attacks which hinder it from practical implementation. In this paper, we propose a novel security protocol based on group signature and identity-based signature scheme to meet the unique requirements of vehicular communication networks. The proposed protocol not only guarantees security and anonymity, but also provides easy traceability property when the identity of the sender of a message has to be revealed by the authority. To further enable Internet access, the network architecture incorporating with the proposed security protocol is introduced. Simulation is conducted to analyze the system performance which proves the feasibility of the proposed scheme.

Secure Vehicular Communications Based on Group Signature and ID-Based Signature Scheme

In this paper, we propose a new TESLA (timed efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication) based secure vehicular communication (TSVC) protocol with privacy preserving, aiming to achieve less communication overhead without compromising the security and privacy requirements. With TSVC, the communication overhead can be significantly reduced due to the message authentication code (MAC) tag attached in each packet and only a fast hash operation is required to verify each packet. Simulation results show that TSVC maintains acceptable message latency with much smaller packet size while significantly reducing the message loss ratio compared with that by the existing PKI-based protocols especially when the traffic is denser.

Performance Enhancement for Secure Vehicular Communications

Position-based routing for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks is a promising approach to reduce route overhead by using the location information of each node. However, in most of the previously reported position-based routing protocols, a node has to periodically broadcast its current position coordinates and identifiers to its one-hop neighbors. Such information could be easily eavesdropped on by an adversary if it is not protected, and consequently, location privacy would be violated. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy-aware position-based routing protocol (PPBR), in which a node takes dynamic pseudo identifiers instead of its real identity in advertising its position. Furthermore, PPBR provides end-to-end anonymity to any intermediate nodes along the route. The theoretical analysis shows that the probability of tracking a node under PPBR through traffic analysis would be very small. We compare the performance of PPBR with that by GPSR and AODV through extensive simulation, which demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme. We also show that frequent update of the pseudo identifier of each node yields an insignificant impact on routing performance and overhead.

Xiaoting Sun

Papers

GSIS: A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Vehicular Communications

TSVC: timed efficient and secure vehicular communications with privacy preserving

Secure Vehicular Communications Based on Group Signature and ID-Based Signature Scheme

Performance Enhancement for Secure Vehicular Communications

PPBR: Privacy-Aware Position-Based Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks