Self-Healing Group Key Distribution Facilitating Source Authentication Using Block Codes

Secure group key distribution is essential for many group-oriented applications such as sensor networks, multimedia broadcast services, and Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. There are several challenges and requirements in designing secure group key distribution. Among them, computational efficiency, communication efficiency, adaptability to dynamic group membership change, robustness to various security threats, self-healing capacities, and source authentication are desirable. It is very challenging to design an efficient group distribution that satisfies all the requirements and challenges. Based on block codes, we propose an efficient self-healing group key distribution that facilitates both message source authentication and secure group key distribution, where the source identification and authentication can facilitate intrusion detection and identification. Both the privacy of the group key and the authentication of message sources are computationally secure. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first codes-based scheme that satisfies all the above requirements and facilitates message source authentication. The merits of the proposed scheme include the following: (1) it is highly efficient in terms of computation and communication, (2) it provides self-healing capacities for unstable environments, (3) it is very robust to various security threats and attacks, (4) it facilitates both message source authentication and secure group key distribution, and (5) it greatly improves the communication performance, compared to the state-of-the-art schemes. The security properties are analyzed, and the performance evaluations confirm its efficiency and practicality.

Road Condition Monitoring with Source Authentication in VANET

In recent technologies, it has been said that, to improve the travel efficiency and safety of transportation systems, vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) has been used as the promising technology where each vehicle is able to collect and communicate the information about current road or traffic condition at a particular location using an embedded on-board unit with the help of distributed roadside units. Examples are: While detection of some accident, congestion, jam, etc., vehicles broadcast warning signals to the nearby vehicles which would give a better awareness to every nearby vehicles about the driving environment and these nearby vehicles would change the driving plan if needed. The VANET technology has gained great attentions from both industry and academics in the recent days.

An Efficient and Secure Alert System for VANETs to Improve Crosswalks’ Security in Smart Cities

A key characteristic of Smart Cities is the ability to reduce conflicts between different agents coexisting in a dynamic system, such as the interaction between vehicles and pedestrians. This paper presents a system to augment the awareness of vehicle drivers regarding the presence of pedestrians in nearby crosswalks. The proposed system interconnects Road Side Units (RSUs), which are informed about the state of the crosswalks, and vehicles, in order to spread to vehicles, the information about the presence of pedestrians in crosswalks. To prevent false information spreading, RSUs sign the alert messages they broadcast and all vehicles can validate the signatures. This poses strong security requirements, such as non-repudiation of alert messages, as well as strong real-time requirements, such as minimum message validation delays among vehicles approaching a crosswalk of interest. To manage the signed alert messages, we are proposing Nimble Asymmetric Cryptography (NAC), which authenticates implicit broadcast messages. NAC minimizes the usage of asymmetric ciphers, which are fundamental to assure non-repudiation but increase performance penalties and uses hash chaining for source authentication of implicit messages.