Security Analysis and Improvements on a Remote Integrity Checking Scheme for Regenerating-Coding-Based Distributed Storage

Enabling remote data integrity checking with failure recovery becomes exceedingly critical in distributed cloud systems. With the properties of a lower repair bandwidth while preserving fault tolerance, regenerating coding and network coding (NC) have received much attention in the coding-based storage field. Recently, an outstanding outsourced auditing scheme named NC-Audit was proposed for regenerating-coding-based distributed storage. The scheme claimed that it can effectively achieve lightweight privacy-preserving data verification remotely for these networked distributed systems. However, our algebraic analysis shows that NC-Audit can be easily broken due to a potential defect existing in its schematic design. That is, an adversarial cloud server can forge some illegal blocks to cheat the auditor with a high probability when the coding field is large. From the perspective of algebraic security, we propose a remote data integrity checking scheme RNC-Audit by resorting to hiding partial critical information to the server without compromising system performance. Our evaluation shows that the proposed scheme has significantly lower overhead compared to the state-of-the-art schemes for distributed remote data auditing.

Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) Message Content Plausibility Check for Platoons through Low-Power Beaconing

Although the IEEE Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) and 3GPP Cellular V2X deployments are imminent, their standards do not yet cover an important security aspect; the message content plausibility check. In safety-critical driving situations, vehicles cannot blindly trust the content of received safety messages, because an attacker may have forged false values in it in order to cause unsafe response from the receiving vehicles. In particular, the attacks mounted from remote, well-hidden positions around roads are considered the most apparent danger. So far, there have been three approaches to validating V2X message content: checking based on sensor fusion, behavior analysis, and communication constraints. This paper discusses the three existing approaches. In addition, it discusses a communication-based checking scheme that supplements the existing approaches. It uses low-power transmission of vehicle identifiers to identify remote attackers. We demonstrate its potential address in the case of an autonomous vehicle platooning application.