Security and Privacy in Vehicle
Communications
Summary: Vehicle networks
(VNETs) are expected to be one of the next wave of information technology,
which will transform people’s experiences on the wheel through information
services relating to driving safety and other appealing applications. The
success of VNETs heavily relies on solving the security and privacy issues in car-to-car or car-to-roadside communications. Our research in this area has been addressing a few most important yet
challenging issues. The challenges come
from unique VNET characteristics, including: short connection time due to high
speed, large amount of participating vehicles, a distinctive variety of
applications, and a various security threats.
The research efforts are summarized below.
1. Secure
and privacy-preserving protocol design.
In many cases, security may bear opposite goals as
privacy. For examples, authentication may conflict with the user’s identity
privacy; a series authentication and association may reveal the trajectory of the cars, violating location privacy; location verification of the reported events and the
transmitting venues may conflict with location privacy as well. To address the need for both security and privacy, we took an approach
that considers jointly the two
conflicting requirements in protocol design. This has resulted in the following novel pieces of
work.
(a) We developed a privacy-preserving quick
authentication architecture and three schemes using different security primitives in realizing the architecture. The architecture shifts the
common paradigm of authentication that goes back to home networks to a new
paradigm of authentication that performs at the access points at roadsides.
This allows the architecture to reduce the number of
authentication messages, leading to one-third shorter authentication response
time when roaming, which gives data traffic more time in using the short
connection time. This architecture
assumes background security check of roadside APs. Analysis on the security and privacy properties of the three schemes
can provide security guarantees under some strong security threats with
strengthened privacy and reduced authentication time.
(b) We developed a secure relative location protocol to prevent the adversary from tracking a vehicle’s
motion. There are two reasons we used relative location. One
is that GPS data is less useful for fast moving cars, also GPS system can be
unavailable or vulnerable to malicious attacks. The other is that the nodes’
relative locations among surrounding vehicles can provide equivalent functions
as GPS does, e.g., to help verifying a message source, making them a good
alternative to GPS information. The key
protocol development is to solve the security issues in determining the
relationship in neighborhood topology, and defending malicious attacks. Our analysis and
simulation results show a few more advantages, e.g., lightweight, resistant to fake location claims, and
decentralized.
2. Secure trustworthy
communication architecture.
A proactive
approach can be essential in pursuing the prediction and
prevention that aims at delivering timely security support for safe driving
application. With collaborators, we took a new look at the distinctive VNET
situations and quick changes between the situations, and developed a novel concept called
situation aware trust (SAT) and an architecture to realize it. Among many components in the SAT
architecture, one key component is the policy groups in
corresponding to the security and privacy requirements and configurations for
the situations in order to achieve both communication security and data
correctness. The policy group can be constructed flexibly to generate
corresponding keys. The attribute based
cryptography enables keys to be calculated and distrusted, either off-line or
on-line, wining the time for emergency and situation changes. This architecture
not only greatly reduces the trust management overhead in VNETs, but also
includes components to transform trust from Internet social communities and to
handle exceptional infrastructure failure situations.