Biblio

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have a strategic goal to achieve service delivery in roads and smart cities, considering the integration and communication between vehicles, sensors and fixed road-side components (routers, gateways and services). VANETs have singular characteristics such as fast mobile nodes, self-organization, distributed network and frequently changing topology. Despite the recent evolution of VANETs, security, data integrity and users privacy information are major concerns, since attacks prevention is still open issue. One of the most dangerous attacks in VANETs is the Sybil, which forges false identities in the network to disrupt compromise the communication between the network nodes. Sybil attacks affect the service delivery related to road safety, traffic congestion, multimedia entertainment and others. Thus, VANETs claim for security mechanism to prevent Sybil attacks. Within this context, this paper proposes a mechanism, called SyDVELM, to detect Sybil attacks in VANETs based on artificial intelligence techniques. The SyDVELM mechanism uses Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) with occasional features of vehicular nodes, minimizing the identification time, maximizing the detection accuracy and improving the scalability. The results suggest that the suitability of SyDVELM mechanism to mitigate Sybil attacks and to maintain the service delivery in VANETs.

Generating a secure source of publicly-verifiable randomness could be the single most fundamental technical challenge on a distributed network, especially in the blockchain context. Many current proposals face serious problems of scalability and security issues. We present a protocol which can be implemented on a blockchain that ensures unpredictable, tamper-resistant, scalable and publicly-verifiable outcomes. The main building blocks of our protocol are homomorphic encryption (HE) and verifiable random functions (VRF). The use of homomorphic encryption enables mathematical operations to be performed on encrypted data, to ensure no one knows the outcome prior to being generated. The protocol requires O(n) elliptic curve multiplications and additions as well as O(n) signature signing and verification operations, which permits great scalability. We present a comparison between recent approaches to the generation of random beacons.

Performing a fair exchange without a Trusted Third Party (TTP) was considered to be impossible. With multi party computation and practices like Proof-of-Work (PoW), blockchain accomplishes a fair exchange in a trustless network. Data confidentiality is a key challenge that has to be resolved before adopting blockchain for enterprise applications where tokenized assets will be transferred. Protocols like Zcash are already providing the same for financial transactions but lacks flexibility required to apply in most of the potential use cases of blockchain. Most of the real world application work in a way where a transaction is carried out when a particular action is performed. Also, the zero knowledge proof method used in Zcash, ZKSNARK has certain weaknesses restricting its adoption. One of the major drawbacks of ZKSNARK is that it requires an initial trust setup phase which is difficult to achieve in blockchain ecosystem. ZKSTARK, an interactive zero knowledge proof does not require this phase and also provides security against post quantum attacks. We propose a system that uses two indistinguishable hash functions along with ZKSTARK to improve the flexibility of blockchain platforms. The two indistinguishable hash functions are chosen from SHA3-finalists based on their security, performance and inner designs.

For sharing resources using ad hoc communication MANET are quite effective and scalable medium. MANET is a distributed, decentralized, dynamic network with no fixed infrastructure, which are self- organized and self-managed. Achieving high security level is a major challenge in case of MANET. Layered architecture is one of the ways for handling security challenges, which enables collection and analysis of data from different security dimensions. This work proposes a novel multi-layered outlier detection algorithm using hierarchical similarity metric with hierarchical categorized data. Network performance with and without the presence of outlier is evaluated for different quality-of-service parameters like percentage of APDR and AT for small (100 to 200 nodes), medium (200 to 1000 nodes) and large (1000 to 3000 nodes) scale networks. For a network with and without outliers minimum improvements observed are 9.1 % and 0.61 % for APDR and AT respectively while the maximum improvements of 22.1 % and 104.1 %.

Electronic power grid is a distributed network used for transferring electricity and power from power plants to consumers. Based on sensor readings and control system signals, power grid states are measured and estimated. As a result, most conventional attacks, such as denial-of-service attacks and random attacks, could be found by using the Kalman filter. However, false data injection attacks are designed against state estimation models. Currently, distributed Kalman filtering is proved effective in sensor networks for detection and estimation problems. Since meters are distributed in smart power grids, distributed estimation models can be used. Thus in this paper, we propose a diffusion Kalman filter for the power grid to have a good performance in estimating models and to effectively detect false data injection attacks.