Palak Bagga received her doctorate in Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). Her research work was supervised by Dr. Ashok Kumar Das. Here’s a summary of her research work on Design and Analysis of Authentication Protocols for Internet of Vehicles:
Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is an extension of Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication network. IoV is a connected adhoc network (Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET)), where each vehicle in the network is a node, connected to other vehicles and also to the public Internet. IoV helps in enhancing driving aids with the help of vehicle’s Artificial Intelligence (AI), awareness of other vehicles and their actions. The autonomous vehicles can instantaneously communicate with other vehicles surrounding them.
Since the communication among various entities involved in the IoV environment is via open channel (e.g. vehicles, pedestrians, fleet management systems, and road-side infrastructure), it gives an opportunity to a passive/active adversary to intercept, modify, delete or even insert fake information during communication. It is then a serious concern for the vehicles users to determine whether the received information is genuine. Many security protocols have addressed this issue by adding authentication mechanism. Authentication of sender is a process of verifying his/her identity claimed by or for a system entity. Authentication of the messages ensures that the messages which is flowing in the network is unintercepted and unforged. Mutual authentication is a type of authentication which allows the involved entities simultaneously authenticate each other in order to establish a secure communication between them via computed session key.
In this thesis, we study the IoV paradigm and its comparison and evolution over VANETs. We present a taxonomy of security protocols designed for IoV security. We address the threats and attacks in IoV environment. In particular, we focus on various authentication protocols in IoV. We propose authentication schemes, to accomplish mutual authentication, conditional privacy preserving, batch authentication and blockchain based authentication among the involved entities in the IoV environment for secure communication. For every proposed scheme, a detailed comparative analysis among various state-of-art authentication protocols proposed in the related IoV environment is provided to show their effectiveness as well as security and functionality features.
The first study presents a new mutual authentication and key agreement protocol in Internet of Vehicles-enabled Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), using the elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) technique. The proposed protocol deals with the challenges during open communication among entities in IoV environment. An open communication can be targeted by the adversary to eavesdrop, modify, insert fabricated (or malicious) messages, or delete any data-in-transit; thus, resulting in replay, impersonation, man-in-the-middle, privileged-insider, and other related attacks. In addition to providing security, the proposed scheme also achieves anonymity and untraceability. It provides a mutual authentication between vehicle and vehicle and also between a vehicle and a road side unit (RSU). Using both formal and informal security analysis, as well as formal security verification using an Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool, the proposed scheme is proved to be secured against several known attacks in an IoV-enabled ITS environment. Furthermore, a detailed comparative analysis shows that the proposed scheme has low communication and computational overheads, and offers better security and functionality attributes in comparison to other competing schemes. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed scheme using NS2.
In our second study, we design a new conditional privacy preserving batch verification based authentication mechanism in the IoV environment using ECC technique, where a vehicle can authenticate its neighbor vehicle and also an RSU can authenticate its nearby vehicles in a batch. The proposed scheme incurs low computation cost as it is implements batch authentication. The proposed scheme is shown to be highly secure against a passive/active adversary through various security analysis, such as random oracle based formal security, formal security verification via automated simulation tool (AVISPA), and also informal security analysis. An exhaustive comparative analysis reveals that the proposed scheme offers better security and functionality attributes, when compared with the relevant schemes.
Finally, in the third study, we focus on designing a novel blockchain-enabled batch authentication scheme in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-envisioned IoV-based smart city deployment. We collaborate mutual authentication, batch authentication and blockchaining to produce an efficient scheme. The vehicles in IoV can be used to opportunistically gather and distribute the data in a smart city environment. However, at the same time, various security threats arise due to insecure communication happening among various entities due to lack of trust. Moreover with the increase in number of vehicles the schemes are unable to address the complexity due to scalability. Therefore, incorporating AI/Machine Learning (ML) in blockchaining produces a secure, efficient and intelligent less complex schemes. The data stored in the blocks in the blockchain are authentic and genuine, which makes the AI/ML algorithms to work at their exceptions in order produce correct predictions on the blockchain data. We propose: 1) vehicle to vehicle (V2V) authentication that allows a vehicle to authenticate its neighbor vehicles in its cluster, and 2) batch authentication that permits a group of cluster vehicles to be authenticated by their RSU. At the end, a group key is established among the vehicles and RSU in their cluster. RSU then gathers securely data from its vehicles and form several transactions including the information of vehicles and its own given information to the cluster member vehicles. The transactions are formed later by the nearby fog server associated with RSU and then by the cloud server to form a complete block. The created blocks are mined by the cloud servers in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) cloud server network through the voting-based Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) consensus algorithm. The authentic and genuine data of the blockchain are utilized for Big data analytics through AI/ML algorithms. Through formal and informal security analysis, and via formal security verification tool it is shown that the proposed scheme is highly robust against various attacks. A detailed comparative analysis reveals that the proposed scheme achieves superior security and functionality features, and offers comparable storage, communication and computational costs as compared to other existing schemes.
Keywords: Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Vehicular Adhoc Network (VANET), Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), smart city, mutual authentication, key management, privacy preservation, batch authentication, blockchain, biometrics, fuzzy extractor, elliptic curve cryptography, bilinear pairing, security, AVISPA simulation, NS2 simulation