Secure Communication Mechanisms for Trustworthy Vehicular Coordination
Funded through the Graduate School in Computer Science (CUGS)
Involved persons: Felipe Boeira (PhD student), Mikael Asplund (PI)
Background
Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are becoming increasingly
sophisticated and connected. Emerging applications include vehicular
platoons, collision avoidance, and emergency vehicle awareness. The
next generation of vehicular applications need to consider a holistic
perspective on traffic flows in order to meet the increasing demands
on sustainable transport and user safety and comfort. However, such
coordinated mobility between vehicles requires robust and secure
communication primitives.
Current vehicular communication standards provide some support for
security mechanisms such as the ability to sign messages. However, the
increasing amount of software and network interfaces of modern
vehicles make them potentially vulnerable to malware and other forms
of cyberattacks. Therefore, establishing real trust between vehicles
remains an open problem. This is a critical issue since the safety of
the participating vehicles might depend on the accuracy and
truthfulness of information from other entities.
Chen et al. [1] presented an example of what can occur if
the design of connected vehicular applications has not sufficiently
accounted for the possibility of false information. The authors
analyse the Intelligent Traffic Signal System (I-SIG), which is
currently being launched as a pilot application by the US department
of transportation. The authors show that by spoofing messages, a
single attacker is able to disturb the signalling control algorithm,
resulting in massive traffic jams. Moreover, our work (Boiera et al. 2017)
demonstrates that the ability to create fake identities coupled with
false message contents can cause severe collisions for vehicular
platooning scenarios.
Common for these works is that they consider attacks that use
incorrect information regarding speed and location of one or multiple
vehicles in the area. Counteracting such attacks require some form of
location verification. There is a wide range of works that try to
tackle this long-standing problem using various assumptions. For
example, the work by Yan et al. [2] use antenna arrays to verify that
claimed locations are consistent with the angle at which signals
arrive to a base station. However, given the inherent uncertainty
associated with radio propagation and the potentially complex attack
scenarios, collaborative algorithms are needed to differentiate false
alarms from real attacks. Existing work for collaborative location
verification such as that by Zhu and Cao [3] are not adapted for the
high-speed scenarios associated with vehicular applications.
Problem description
The purpose of this project is to investigate secure communication
mechanisms that allow trust to be established between
vehicles. Examples of such mechanism are the verification of the
physical location of nearby vehicles and also the sharing of that
information within the group to enable trust
propagation. Key challenges that will be considered include limited
and congestion-prone communication channels, lack of ubiquitous
communication infrastructure, and the possibility of reputation
attacks from malicious entities.
Planned approach
The first steps to analyse the problem at hand is to understanding the potential
impact of position falsification attacks in platooning applications. The immediate next phase is to establish
mechanisms that are able to detect and mitigate such location
falsification attacks. This requires making use of a combination of
input data such as local sensors, infrastructure capabilities (e.g., the
localisation capabilities provided by 5G technology), and the sharing
of that information among the vehicles.
Moreover, much more work is needed to understand the performance and
impact of such security mechanisms on the communication system and its
ability to enhance vehicular safety. It is clear that cryptographic
primitives will have an important role to play to provide trustworthy
communication between vehicles. The project will investigate the trade-off between
the security and the frequency and range of messages that can be
exchanged between vehicles (especially in dense scenarios) due to the
extra overhead induced by these methods.
The mechanisms developed in the project will be implemented and
evaluated using simulation-based tools for vehicular
communication. Moreover, fully understanding how groups of vehicles
can establish mutually verifiable information requires formulating
suitable theoretical modelling frameworks for this purpose.
Project publications
- G. Grimsdal, P. Lundgren, C. Vestlund, F. Boeira, and
M. Asplund, Can Microkernels Mitigate Microarchitectural Attacks?, in
Secure IT Systems (A. Askarov, R. R. Hansen, and W. Rafnsson, eds.),
Springer International Publishing, 2019.
doi:10.1007/978-3-030-35055-0_15.
Available as
PDF.
- F. Boeira, M. Asplund, and M. Barcellos, Decentralized Proof of Location in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, Computer Communications, 2019. doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2019.07.024.
- F. Boeira, M. Asplund, and M. P. Barcellos, Mitigating
Position Falsification Attacks in Vehicular Platooning, in Vehicular
Networking Conference (VNC), IEEE, 2018.
doi:10.1109/VNC.2018.8628427 Available as
PDF
- F. Boeira, M. Asplund, and M. P. Barcellos, Vouch: A
Secure Proof-of-Location Scheme for VANETs, in International
Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation of Wireless and Mobile
Systems (MSWiM), ACM, 2018.
doi:10.1145/3242102.3242125 Available as
PDF.
- Felipe Boeira, Marinho P. Barcellos, Edison Pignaton de Freitas,
Alexey Vinel, and Mikael Asplund Effects of Colluding Sybil Nodes
in Message Falsification Attacks for Vehicular Platooning, in
proceedings of IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC),
2017. doi: 10.1109/VNC.2017.8275641
[PDF]
- Felipe Boeira, Marinho P. Barcellos, Edison Pignaton de Freitas,
Mikael Asplund and Alexey Vinel, On the Impact of Sybil Attacks in
Cooperative Driving Scenarios, in proceedings of IFIP
Networking 2017 Conference and Workshops
Other references
- [1] Qi Alfred Chen, Yucheng Yin, Yiheng Feng, Z. Morley Mao, Henry X. Liu, Exposing Congestion Attack on Emerging Connected Vehicle based
Traffic Signal Control, Network and Distributed System Security
Symposium (NDSS), DOI: 10.14722/ndss.2018.23236
- [2] S. Yan, R. Malaney, I. Nevat, and G. W. Peters. 2016. Location Verification Systems for VANETs in Rician Fading Channels.
IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology 65, 7 (July 2016), 5652–5664. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVT.2015.2453160
- [3] Z. Zhu and G. Cao, APPLAUS: A Privacy-Preserving Location Proof Updating System for location-based services, 2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM, Shanghai, 2011, pp. 1889-1897.
doi: 10.1109/INFCOM.2011.5934991
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