Visible to the public Biblio

Filters: Author is Mohapatra, P.  [Clear All Filters]
2019-01-31
Lyu, C., Pande, A., Zhang, Y., Gu, D., Mohapatra, P..  2018.  FastTrust: Fast and Anonymous Spatial-Temporal Trust for Connected Cars on Expressways. 2018 15th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON). :1–9.

Connected cars have received massive attention in Intelligent Transportation System. Many potential services, especially safety-related ones, rely on spatial-temporal messages periodically broadcast by cars. Without a secure authentication algorithm, malicious cars may send out invalid spatial-temporal messages and then deny creating them. Meanwhile, a lot of private information may be disclosed from these spatial-temporal messages. Since cars move on expressways at high speed, any authentication must be performed in real-time to prevent crashes. In this paper, we propose a Fast and Anonymous Spatial-Temporal Trust (FastTrust) mechanism to ensure these properties. In contrast to most authentication protocols which rely on fixed infrastructures, FastTrust is distributed and mostly designed on symmetric-key cryptography and an entropy-based commitment, and is able to fast authenticate spatial-temporal messages. FastTrust also ensures the anonymity and unlinkability of spatial-temporal messages by developing a pseudonym-varying scheduling scheme on cars. We provide both analytical and simulation evaluations to show that FastTrust achieves the security and privacy properties. FastTrust is low-cost in terms of communication and computational resources, authenticating 20 times faster than existing Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm.

2018-01-16
Feng, X., Zheng, Z., Cansever, D., Swami, A., Mohapatra, P..  2017.  A signaling game model for moving target defense. IEEE INFOCOM 2017 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications. :1–9.

Incentive-driven advanced attacks have become a major concern to cyber-security. Traditional defense techniques that adopt a passive and static approach by assuming a fixed attack type are insufficient in the face of highly adaptive and stealthy attacks. In particular, a passive defense approach often creates information asymmetry where the attacker knows more about the defender. To this end, moving target defense (MTD) has emerged as a promising way to reverse this information asymmetry. The main idea of MTD is to (continuously) change certain aspects of the system under control to increase the attacker's uncertainty, which in turn increases attack cost/complexity and reduces the chance of a successful exploit in a given amount of time. In this paper, we go one step beyond and show that MTD can be further improved when combined with information disclosure. In particular, we consider that the defender adopts a MTD strategy to protect a critical resource across a network of nodes, and propose a Bayesian Stackelberg game model with the defender as the leader and the attacker as the follower. After fully characterizing the defender's optimal migration strategies, we show that the defender can design a signaling scheme to exploit the uncertainty created by MTD to further affect the attacker's behavior for its own advantage. We obtain conditions under which signaling is useful, and show that strategic information disclosure can be a promising way to further reverse the information asymmetry and achieve more efficient active defense.

2018-01-10
Hu, P., Pathak, P. H., Shen, Y., Jin, H., Mohapatra, P..  2017.  PCASA: Proximity Based Continuous and Secure Authentication of Personal Devices. 2017 14th Annual IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking (SECON). :1–9.
User's personal portable devices such as smartphone, tablet and laptop require continuous authentication of the user to prevent against illegitimate access to the device and personal data. Current authentication techniques require users to enter password or scan fingerprint, making frequent access to the devices inconvenient. In this work, we propose to exploit user's on-body wearable devices to detect their proximity from her portable devices, and use the proximity for continuous authentication of the portable devices. We present PCASA which utilizes acoustic communication for secure proximity estimation with sub-meter level accuracy. PCASA uses Differential Pulse Position Modulation scheme that modulates data through varying the silence period between acoustic pulses to ensure energy efficiency even when authentication operation is being performed once every second. It yields an secure and accurate distance estimation even when user is mobile by utilizing Doppler effect for mobility speed estimation. We evaluate PCASA using smartphone and smartwatches, and show that it supports up to 34 hours of continuous authentication with a fully charged battery.