Biblio

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are designed to provide traffic safety by enabling vehicles to broadcast information-such as speed, location and heading-through inter-vehicular communications to proactively avoid collisions. However, the attacks targeting these networks might overshadow their advantages if not protected against. One powerful threat against VANETs is vehicular botnets. In our earlier work, we demonstrated several vehicular botnet attacks that can have damaging impacts on the security and privacy of VANETs. In this paper, we present SHIELDNET, the first detection mechanism against vehicular botnets. Similar to the detection approaches against Internet botnets, we target the vehicular botnet communication and use several machine learning techniques to identify vehicular bots. We show via simulation that SHIELDNET can identify 77 percent of the vehicular bots. We propose several improvements on the VANET standards and show that their existing vulnerabilities make an effective defense against vehicular botnets infeasible.

Many recent advances of network caching focus on i) more effectively modeling the preferences of a regional user group to different web contents, and ii) reducing the cost of content delivery by storing the most popular contents in regional caches. However, the context under which the users interact with the network system usually causes tremendous variations in a user group's preferences on the contents. To effectively leverage such contextual information for more efficient network caching, we propose a novel mechanism to incorporate context-aware collaborative filtering into demand-driven caching. By differentiating the characterization of user interests based on a priori contexts, our approach seeks to enhance the cache performance with a more dynamic and fine-grained cache allocation process. In particular, our approach is general and adapts to various types of context information. Our evaluation shows that this new approach significantly outperforms previous non-demand-driven caching strategies by offering much higher cached content rate, especially when utilizing the contextual information.

In-network caching is a feature shared by all proposed Information Centric Networking (ICN) architectures as it is critical to achieving a more efficient retrieval of content. However, the default "cache everything everywhere" universal caching scheme has caused the emergence of several privacy threats. Timing attacks are one such privacy breach where attackers can probe caches and use timing analysis of data retrievals to identify if content was retrieved from the data source or from the cache, the latter case inferring that this content was requested recently. We have previously proposed a betweenness centrality based caching strategy to mitigate such attacks by increasing user anonymity. We demonstrated its efficacy in a transit-stub topology. In this paper, we further investigate the effect of betweenness centrality based caching on cache privacy and user anonymity in more general synthetic and real world Internet topologies. It was also shown that an attacker with access to multiple compromised routers can locate and track a mobile user by carrying out multiple timing analysis attacks from various parts of the network. We extend our privacy evaluation to a scenario with mobile users and show that a betweenness centrality based caching policy provides a mobile user with path privacy by increasing an attacker's difficulty in locating a moving user or identifying his/her route.

Multi-modal communication methods have been proposed for underwater wireless networks (UWNs) to tackle the challenging physical characteristics of underwater wireless channels. These include the use of acoustic and optic technology for range-dependent transmissions. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an appealing choice for managing these networks with multi-modal communication capabilities, allowing for increased adaptability in the UWN design. In this work, we develop a simulation platform for software-defined underwater wireless networks (SDUWNs). Similarto OpenNet, this platform integrates Mininet with ns-3 via TapBridge modules. The multi-modal communication is implemented by equipping each ns-3 node with multiple net devices. Multiple channel modules connecting corresponding net devices are configured to reflect the channel characteristics. The proposed simulation platform is validated in a case study for oceanographic data collection.

Traditionally, the vehicle has been the extension of the manual ambulatory system, docile to the drivers' commands. Recent advances in communications, controls and embedded systems have changed this model, paving the way to the Intelligent Vehicle Grid. The car is now a formidable sensor platform, absorbing information from the environment, from other cars (and from the driver) and feeding it to other cars and infrastructure to assist in safe navigation, pollution control and traffic management. The next step in this evolution is just around the corner: the Internet of Autonomous Vehicles. Like other important instantiations of the Internet of Things (e.g., the smart building, etc), the Internet of Vehicles will not only upload data to the Internet with V2I. It will also use V2V communications, storage, intelligence, and learning capabilities to anticipate the customers' intentions and learn from other peers. V2I and V2V are essential to the autonomous vehicle, but carry the risk of attacks. This paper will address the privacy attacks to which vehicles are exposed when they upload private data to Internet Servers. It will also outline efficient methods to preserve privacy.

Today, mobile data owners lack consent and control over the release and utilization of their location data. Third party applications continuously process and access location data without data owners granular control and without knowledge of how location data is being used. The proliferation of GPS enabled IoT devices will lead to larger scale abuses of trust. In this paper we present the first design and implementation of a privacy module built into the GPSD daemon. The GPSD daemon is a low-level GPS interface that runs on GPS enabled devices. The integration of the privacy module ensures that data owners have granular control over the release of their GPS location. We describe the design of our privacy module integration into the GPSD daemon.