Abstracts Category : Other

Enhancing Security, Privacy, and Efficiency of VehicularNetworks

by Sarah Yaseen Al-Shareeda

Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) promises to empowerthe future autonomous vehicles with a cooperative awarenessfacility that will help in avoiding accidents and alleviatingtraffic congestion. The foreseen collective awareness requires thevehicles to communicate with their neighbors and with theinfrastructure; such communication will need the fulfillment ofmany requirements such as security, privacy, and efficiency. TheDedicated Short-Range Communication (DSRC) standard has beenformulated to afford these requisites. On one hand, when focusingon the application layer, DSRC adopts the successful Internet-basedPublic Key Infrastructure (PKI) framework to safeguard thevehicles. However, PKI alone cannot comprehensively meet all of thesecurity and privacy requirements. On the other hand, the DSRC 'sMedium Access Control (MAC) layer adopts the IEEE 802.11p accessmode, which also needs augmentation to fulfill the efficiency ofcommunication when collisions arise for safety beacons. Since manyissues have not been well addressed in DSRC, academic, industrial,and governmental research has flourished over the last two decadesto complement the standard. As being part of such large researchcommunity, we also have been incentivized to contribute with ourown solutions. Our contributions have been ranging between twolimits: either finding solutions to acclimate with the availableDSRC shortcomings or disregarding the bias that DSRC has towardsusing only specific standards by bringing other alternativeframeworks into scene. With the first direction in mind, ourefforts are a mixture of high-level re-arrangement protocols suchas grouping and overhead omissions to minimize the PKI and CarrierSense Multiple Access - Collision Avoidance (CSMA/CA) privacy andefficiency shortcomings. For the other direction, we especiallyaddress the application layer level. Since some frameworks havesmall communication overhead while others have high anonymoustraits, we have attempted low-level alternatives to PKI andElliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) and to overcometheir confidentiality, privacy, and efficiency limitations. First,to augment the security of sensitive non-safety applications inPKI, our first research track concerns itself with findingalternatives for the used low-level encryption primitive such asECIES and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). The reason behindsuch effort is the authentication-dependability of ECIES/AES andkey management of AES; therefore, we investigate the suitability ofusing a state-of-the-art low-level partial homomorphic encryptionscheme to generate encrypted identities and keys to secure thesensitive non-safety data transfer. Our second research trackconcerns itself with preserving location privacy of vehicles sincePKI does not afford privacy. To avoid the available privacypreservation solutions' covering-encryption overhead andsilent-periods' lack of communication, we propose the idea ofmaking vehicles create dynamic mix zones using an alternative superAdvisors/Committee Members: Ozguner, Fusun (Advisor).