Standardization and harmonization efforts have reached a consensus towards using a special-purpose Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) in upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. However, there are still several technical challenges with no conclusive answers; one such an important yet open challenge is the acquisition of short-term credentials, pseudonym: how should each vehicle interact with the VPKI, e.g., how frequently and for how long? Should each vehicle itself determine the pseudonym lifetime? Answering these questions is far from trivial. Each choice can affect both the user privacy and the system performance and possibly, as a result, its security. In this paper, we make a novel systematic effort to address this multifaceted question. We craft three generally applicable policies and experimentally evaluate the VPKI system performance, leveraging two large-scale mobility datasets. We consider the most promising, in terms of efficiency, pseudonym acquisition policies; we find that within this class of policies, the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead. Moreover, in all cases, this work is the first to provide tangible evidence that the state-of-the-art VPKI can serve sizable areas or domain with modest computing resources.
In [3], the authors proposed a highly efficient secure and privacy-preserving scheme for secure vehicular communications. The proposed scheme consists of four protocols: system setup, protocol for STP and STK distribution, protocol for common string synchronization, and protocol for vehicular communications. Here we define the security models for the protocol for STP and STK distribution, and the protocol for vehicular communications,respectively. We then prove that these two protocols are secure in our models.
While the adoption of connected vehicles is growing, security and privacy concerns are still the key barriers raised by society. These concerns mandate automakers and standardization groups to propose convenient solutions for privacy preservation. One of the main proposed solutions is the use of Pseudonym-Changing Strategies (PCSs). However, ETSI has recently published a technical report which highlights the absence of standardized and efficient PCSs [1]. This alarming situation mandates an innovative shift in the way that the privacy of end-users is protected during their journey. Software-De…
In this paper, we introduce an efficient and trustworthy conditional privacy-preserving communication protocol for VANETs based on proxy re-signature. The proposed protocol is characterized by the Trusted Authority (TA) designating the Roadside Units (RSUs) to translate signatures computed by the On-Board Units (OBUs) into one that are valid with respect to TA's public key. In addition, the proposed protocol offers both a priori and a posteriori countermeasures: it can not only provide fast anonymous authentication and privacy tracking, but guarantees message trustworthiness for vehicle-to-veh…
The explosive growth of vehicle amount has given rise to a series of traffic problems, such as traffic congestion, road safety, and fuel waste. Collecting vehicles' speed information is an effective way to monitor the traffic condition and avoid vehicles being congested, which however may bring threats to vehicles' location and trajectory privacy. Motivated by the fact that traffic monitoring does not need to know each individual vehicle's speed and the average speed would be sufficient, we propose a privacy-preserving traffic monitoring (PPTM) scheme to aggregate vehicles' speeds at different…
We surveyed and presented the state-of-the-art VC systems, security and privacy architectures and technologies, emphasizing on security and privacy challenges and their solutions for P2P interactions in VSNs towards standardization and deployment. We note that beyond safety applications that have drawn a lot of attention in VC systems, there is significant and rising interest in vehicle-to-vehicle interaction for a range of transportation efficiency and infotainment applications, notably LBS as well as a gamut of services by mobile providers. While this enriches the VC systems and the user exp…
As the most promising application in VANETs, the vehicular announcement allows vehicles to send announcement messages about road conditions to other vehicles far away. The security requirements of reliability and privacy in the vehicular announcement are not easily achieved simultaneously due to the notorious sybil attack. In this paper, we present a novel privacy-preserving vehicular announcements aggregation scheme. The proposed scheme provides threshold authentication and flexible anonymity using message aggregation and interactive threshold ring signature which allows nondeterministic diff…
Vehicular communications disclose rich information about the vehicles and their whereabouts. Pseudonymous authentication secures communication while enhancing user privacy. To enhance location privacy, cryptographic mix-zones were proposed to facilitate vehicles covertly transition to new ephemeral credentials. The resilience to (syntactic and semantic) pseudonym linking (attacks) highly depends on the geometry of the mix-zones, mobility patterns, vehicle density, and arrival rates. We introduce a tracking algorithm for linking pseudonyms before and after a cryptographically protected mix-zone…
Recent advances in Socially Aware Networks (SANs) have allowed its use in many domains, out of which social Internet of vehicles (SIOV) is of prime importance. SANs can provide a promising routing and forwarding paradigm for SIOV by using interest-based communication. Though able to improve the forwarding performance, existing interest-based schemes fail to consider the important issue of protecting users' interest information. In this paper, we propose a PRivacy-preserving Interest-based Forwarding scheme (PRIF) for SIOV, which not only protects the interest information, but also improves the…
Safety, efficiency, privacy, and cybersecurity can be achieved jointly in self-organizing networks of communicating vehicles of various automated driving levels. The underlying approach, solutions and novel results are briefly exposed. We explain why we are faced with a crucial choice regarding motorized society and cyber surveillance.
Privacy-Preserving Offloading for Large Language Models in 6G Vehicular Networks
School of Science and Engineering, Al Akhawayn University in Ifrane（科学与工程学院，阿尔阿赫韦因大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières（电气与计算机工程系，魁北克大学Trois-Rivières分校）
Vehicular Communication (VC) systems will greatly enhance intelligent transportation systems. But their security and the protection of their users' privacy are a prerequisite for deployment. Efforts in industry and academia brought forth a multitude of diverse proposals. These have now converged to a common view, notably on the design of a security infrastructure, a Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (VPKI) that shall enable secure conditionally anonymous VC. Standardization efforts and industry readiness to adopt this approach hint to its maturity. However, there are several open questions r…
We estimate vehicular traffic states from multimodal data collected by single-loop detectors while preserving the privacy of the individual vehicles contributing to the data. To this end, we propose a novel hybrid differential privacy (DP) approach that utilizes minimal randomization to preserve privacy by taking advantage of the relevant traffic state dynamics and the concept of DP sensitivity. Through theoretical analysis and experiments with real-world data, we show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the related baseline non-private and private approaches in terms of accur…
This paper introduces an efficient and spontaneous privacy-preserving protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks based on revocable ring signature. The proposed protocol has three appealing characteristics: First, it offers conditional privacy-preservation: while a receiver can verify that a message issuer is an authorized participant in the system only a trusted authority can reveal the true identity of a message sender. Second, it is spontaneous: safety messages can be authenticated locally, without support from the roadside units or contacting other vehicles. Third, it is efficient by offering …
Several years of academic and industrial research efforts have converged to a common understanding on fundamental security building blocks for the upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. There is a growing consensus towards deploying a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) enables pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts in that direction. However, there are still significant technical issues that remain unresolved. Existing proposals for instantiating the VPKI either need additional detailed specifications or enhanced security and privacy features. Equally importa…
Several years of academic and industrial research efforts have converged to a common understanding on fundamental security building blocks for the upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. There is a growing consensus towards deploying a special-purpose identity and credential management infrastructure, i.e., a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), enabling pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts towards that direction. In spite of the progress made by standardization bodies (IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI) and harmonization efforts (Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC)…
The initial phase of the deployment of Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) has begun and many research challenges still need to be addressed. Location privacy continues to be in the top of these challenges. Indeed, both of academia and industry agreed to apply the pseudonym changing approach as a solution to protect the location privacy of VANETs'users. However, due to the pseudonyms linking attack, a simple changing of pseudonym shown to be inefficient to provide the required protection. For this reason, many pseudonym changing strategies have been suggested to provide an effective pseudonym c…
The central building block of secure and privacy-preserving Vehicular Communication (VC) systems is a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), which provides vehicles with multiple anonymized credentials, termed pseudonyms. These pseudonyms are used to ensure message authenticity and integrity while preserving vehicle (and thus passenger) privacy. In the light of emerging large-scale multi-domain VC environments, the efficiency of the VPKI and, more broadly, its scalability are paramount. In this extended abstract, we leverage the state-of-the-art VPKI system and enhance its functionality t…
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are a particular subclass of mobile ad hoc networks that raise a number of security challenges, notably from the way users authenticate the network. Authentication technologies based on existing security policies and access control rules in such networks assume full trust on Roadside Unit (RSU) and authentication servers. The disclosure of authentication parameters enables user's trace-ability over the network. VANETs' trusted entities (e.g. RSU) can utilize such information to track a user traveling behavior, violating user privacy and anonymity. In this pap…
Standardization and harmonization efforts have reached a consensus towards using a special-purpose Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) in upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. However, there are still several technical challenges with no conclusive answers; one such an important yet open challenge is the acquisition of shortterm credentials, pseudonym: how should each vehicle interact with the VPKI, e.g., how frequently and for how long? Should each vehicle itself determine the pseudonym lifetime? Answering these questions is far from trivial. Each choice can affect both the us…
Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) has mostly gained the attention of today's research efforts, while current solutions to achieve secure VANET, to protect the network from adversary and attacks still not enough, trying to reach a satisfactory level, for the driver and manufacturer to achieve safety of life and infotainment. The need for a robust VANET networks is strongly dependent on their security and privacy features, which will be discussed in this paper. In this paper a various types of security problems and challenges of VANET been analyzed and discussed; we also discuss a set of solutio…
To support location-based services, vehicles must share their location with a server to receive relevant data, compromising their (location) privacy. To alleviate this privacy compromise, the vehicle's location can be obfuscated by adding artificial noise. Under limited available bandwidth, and since the area including the vehicle's location increases with the noise, the server will provide fewer data relevant to the vehicle's true location, reducing the effectiveness of a location-based service. To alleviate this problem, we propose that data relevant to a vehicle is also provided through dir…
Modern vehicles contain more than a hundred Electronic Control Units (ECUs) that communicate over different in-vehicle networks, and they are often connected to the Internet, which makes them vulnerable to various cyber-attacks. Besides, data collected by the connected vehicles is directly connected to the vehicular network. Thus, big vehicular data are collected, which are valuable and generate insights into driver behavior. Previously, a probabilistic modeling and simulation language named vehicleLang is presented to analyze the security of connected vehicles. However, the privacy issues of …
Vehicular adhoc networks allow vehicles to share their information for safety and traffic efficiency. However, sharing information may threaten the driver privacy because it includes spatiotemporal information and is broadcast publicly and periodically. In this paper, we propose a context-adaptive pseudonym changing scheme which lets a vehicle decide autonomously when to change its pseudonym and how long it should remain silent to ensure unlinkability. This scheme adapts dynamically based on the density of the surrounding traffic and the user privacy preferences. We employ a multi-target track…
Cross-reality location privacy protection in 6G-enabled vehicular metaverses: an LLM-enhanced hybrid generative diffusion model-based approach
School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology（自动化学院，广东技术大学）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（计算机科学与工程学院，南洋理工大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Manitoba（电气与计算机工程系，曼尼托巴大学）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Sungkyunkwan University（电气与计算机工程系，成均馆大学）
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are one of the most important components in an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which aims to provide information communication between vehicles. A safety-critical vehicular communication requires security, privacy, auditability, and efficiency. To satisfy these requirements simultaneously, several conditional privacy-preserving authentication schemes are proposed by employing ring signature. However, these methods have been paid too little attention to the issues like \textit{how to choose the valid ring members} or \textit{how to set up a ring}. In …
Blockchain-based Pseudonym Management for Vehicle Twin Migrations in Vehicular Edge Metaverse
School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology（广东工业大学自动化学院）；School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算机科学与工程学院）；School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University（南京大学电子科学与工程学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Auburn University（奥本大学电气与计算机工程系）
Vehicular communication (VC) systems have recently drawn the attention of industry, authorities, and academia. A consensus on the need to secure VC systems and protect the privacy of their users led to concerted efforts to design security architectures. Interestingly, the results different project contributed thus far bear extensive similarities in terms of objectives and mechanisms. As a result, this appears to be an auspicious time for setting the corner-stone of trustworthy VC systems. Nonetheless, there is a considerable distance to cover till their deployment. This paper ponders on the ro…
Transportation safety, one of the main driving forces of the development of vehicular communication (VC) systems, relies on high-rate safety messaging (beaconing). At the same time, there is consensus among authorities, industry, and academia on the need to secure VC systems. With specific proposals in the literature, a critical question must be answered: can secure VC systems be practical and satisfy the requirements of safety applications, in spite of the significant communication and processing overhead and other restrictions security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms impose? To answer this …
Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are one of the most important components in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which aims to provide secure and efficient communication between vehicles. Safety-critical vehicular communication requires security, privacy, and auditability. To satisfy these requirements simultaneously, several conditional privacy-preserving authentication schemes are proposed by employing ring signatures. However, these methods have paid little attention to the issues like how to choose the valid ring members or how to set up a ring. In this paper, we introduce an effici…
In this paper, we review the state of the art of privacy-preserving schemes for ad hoc social networks, including, mobile social networks (MSNs) and vehicular social networks (VSNs). Specifically, we select and in-detail examine thirty-three privacy preserving schemes developed for or applied in the context of ad hoc social networks. These schemes are published between 2008 and 2016. Based on this existing privacy preservation schemes, we survey privacy preservation models, including location privacy, identity privacy, anonymity, traceability, interest privacy, backward privacy, and content or…
In today's digital world, personal data is being continuously collected and analyzed without data owners' consent and choice. As data owners constantly generate data on their personal devices, the tension of storing private data on their own devices yet allowing third party analysts to perform aggregate analytics yields an interesting dilemma. This paper introduces PAS-MC, the first practical privacy-preserving and anonymity stream analytics system. PAS-MC ensures that each data owner locally privatizes their sensitive data before responding to analysts' queries. PAS-MC also protects against t…
Significant developments have taken place over the past few years in the area of vehicular communication (VC) systems. Now, it is well understood in the community that security and protection of private user information are a prerequisite for the deployment of the technology. This is so, precisely because the benefits of VC systems, with the mission to enhance transportation safety and efficiency, are at stake. Without the integration of strong and practical security and privacy enhancing mechanisms, VC systems could be disrupted or disabled, even by relatively unsophisticated attackers. We ad…
University of Sindh（信德大学）；Munster Technological University（芒斯特理工大学）；Nearby Computing（Nearby Computing公司）
The applications concerning vehicular networks benefit from the vision of beyond 5G and 6G technologies such as ultra-dense network topologies, low latency, and high data rates. Vehicular networks have always faced data privacy preservation concerns, which lead to the advent of distributed learning techniques such as federated learning. Although federated learning has solved data privacy preservation issues to some extent, the technique is quite vulnerable to model inversion and model poisoning attacks. We assume that the design of defense mechanism and attacks are two sides of the same coin. …
Vehicular ad-hoc networks have been defined in the literature as communications networks that allow disseminating information among vehicles to help to reduce traffic accidents and congestions. The practical deployment of such networks has been delayed mainly due to economic and technical issues. This paper describes a new software application to detect traffic incidents and exchange information about them, using only smartphones, without any central authority or additional equipment. Both road safety and communication security have been taken into account in the application design. On the one…
Interconnected smart vehicles offer a range of sophisticated services that benefit the vehicle owners, transport authorities, car manufacturers and other service providers. This potentially exposes smart vehicles to a range of security and privacy threats such as location tracking or remote hijacking of the vehicle. In this article, we argue that BlockChain (BC), a disruptive technology that has found many applications from cryptocurrencies to smart contracts, is a potential solution to these challenges. We propose a BC-based architecture to protect the privacy of the users and to increase the…
Vehicular Communication (VC) systems are on the verge of practical deployment. Nonetheless, their security and privacy protection is one of the problems that have been addressed only recently. In order to show the feasibility of secure VC, certain implementations are required. In [1] we discuss the design of a VC security system that has emerged as a result of the European SeVeCom project. In this second paper, we discuss various issues related to the implementation and deployment aspects of secure VC systems. Moreover, we provide an outlook on open security research issues that will arise as …
With the popularity of Blockchain comes grave security-related concerns. Achieving privacy and traceability simultaneously remains an open question. Efforts have been made to address the issues, while they may subject to specific scenarios. This paper studies how to provide a more general solution for this open question. Concretely, we propose Onionchain, featuring a suite of protocols, offering both traceability and privacy. As the term implies, our Onionchain is inspired by Onion routing. We investigate the principles of Onion routing carefully and integrate its mechanism together with Block…
Among the available communication systems, vehicular networks are emerging as one of the most promising and yet most challenging instantiations of mobile ad-hoc network technologies. The deployment of such networks in large scale requires the enforcement of stringent security mechanisms that need to abide by the technical, societal, legal, and economical requirements of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Authentication is an effective process for validating user identity in vehicular netoworks. However, it cannot guarantee the network security by itself. Available industrial standards do not …
Security and privacy in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) mandates use of short-lived credentials (pseudonyms) and cryptographic key pairs. This implies significant computational overhead for vehicles, needing to validate often numerous such pseudonyms within a short period. To alleviate such a bottleneck that could even place vehicle safety at risk, we propose a proactive pseudonym validation approach based on Bloom Filters (BFs). We show that our scheme could liberate computational resources for other (safety- and time-critical) operations with reasonable communication overhead without comp…
FL-DECO-BC: A Privacy-Preserving, Provably Secure, and Provenance-Preserving Federated Learning Framework with Decentralized Oracles on Blockchain for VANETs
The central building block of secure and privacy-preserving Vehicular Communication (VC) systems is a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), which provides vehicles with multiple anonymized credentials, termed pseudonyms. These pseudonyms are used to ensure message authenticity and integrity while preserving vehicle (thus passenger) privacy. In the light of emerging large-scale multi-domain VC environments, the efficiency of the VPKI and, more broadly, its scalability are paramount. By the same token, preventing misuse of the credentials, in particular, Sybil-based misbehavior, and managi…
In this study, we attempt to add to the literature of Connected and Automated Vehicle (CAV) security by incorporating the security vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) and their access technologies. Compounding VANETs and modern vehicles will allow adversaries to gain access to the in-vehicle networks and take control of vehicles remotely to use them as a target or a foothold. Extensive attention has been given to the security breaches in VANETs and in-vehicle networks in literature but there is a gap in literature to assess the security vulnerabilities…
The public key infrastructure (PKI) based authentication protocol provides the basic security services for vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs). However, trust and privacy are still open issues due to the unique characteristics of vehicles. It is crucial for VANETs to prevent internal vehicles from broadcasting forged messages while simultaneously protecting the privacy of each vehicle against tracking attacks. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based anonymous reputation system (BARS) to break the linkability between real identities and public keys to preserve privacy. The certificate and r…
Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication is receiving growing attention from industry and academia as multiple pilot projects explore its capabilities and feasibility. With about 50\% of global road vehicle exports coming from the European Union (EU), and within the context of EU legislation around security and data protection, V2X initiatives must consider security and privacy aspects across the system stack, in addition to road safety. Contrary to this principle, our survey of relevant standards, research outputs, and EU pilot projects indicates otherwise; we identify multiple security and …
Recent advances in Socially Aware Networks (SANs) have allowed its use in many domains, out of which social Internet of vehicles (SIOV) is of prime importance. SANs can provide a promising routing and forwarding paradigm for SIOV by using interest-based communication. Though able to improve the forwarding performance, existing interest-based schemes fail to consider the important issue of protecting users' interest information. In this paper, we propose a PRivacy-preserving Interest-based Forwarding scheme (PRIF) for SIOV, which not only protects the interest information, but also improves the…
MetaTrading: An Immersion-Aware Model Trading Framework for Vehicular Metaverse Services
Department of Mathematics and Information Technology, The Education University of Hong Kong（香港教育大学数学与信息技术系）；Pillar of Information Systems Technology and Design, Singapore University of Technology and Design（新加坡科技设计大学信息系统技术与设计学院）；School of Automation, Guangdong University of Technology（广东技术大学自动化学院）；College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（国防科技大学计算机科学与技术学院）；College of Computing and Data Science, Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Kyung Hee University（韩国成均馆大学计算机科学与工程系）
