Significant developments took place over the past few years in the area of vehicular communication (VC) systems. Now, it is well-understood in the community that security and protection of private user information are a prerequisite for the deployment of the technology. This is so exactly because the benefits of VC systems, with the mission to enhance transportation safety and efficiency, are at stake. Without the integration of strong and practical security and privacy enhancing mechanisms, VC systems could be disrupted or disabled even by relatively unsophisticated attackers. We address this problem within the SeVeCom project, having developed a security architecture that provides a comprehensive and practical solution. We present our results in a set of two papers in this issue. In this first one, we analyze threats and types of adversaries, we identify security and privacy requirements, and present a spectrum of mechanisms to secure VC systems. We provide a solution that can be quickly adopted and deployed. Our progress towards implementation of our architecture, along with results on the performance of the secure VC system, are presented in the second paper. We conclude with an investigation, based on current results, of upcoming elements to be integrated in our secure VC architecture.

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Abstract-Designing a routing protocol for large low-power and lossy networks (LLNs), consisting of thousands of constrained nodes and unreliable links, presents new challenges. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL), have been developed by the IETF ROLL Working Group as a preferred routing protocol to provide IPv6 routing functionality in LLNs. RPL provides path diversity by building and maintaining directed acyclic graphs (DAG) rooted at one (or more) gateway. However, an adversary that impersonates a gateway or has compromised one of the nodes close to the gateway can divert a large part of network traffic forward itself and/or exhaust the nodes' batteries. Therefore in RPL, special security care must be taken when the Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) root is updating the Version Number by which reconstruction of the routing topology can be initiated. The same care also must be taken to prevent an internal attacker (compromised DODAG node) to publish decreased Rank value, which causes a large part of the DODAG to connect to the DODAG root via the attacker and give it the ability to eavesdrop a large part of the network traffic forward itself. Unfortunately, the currently available security services in RPL will not protect against a compromised internal node that can construct and disseminate fake messages. In this paper, a new security service is described that prevents any misbehaving node from illegitimately increasing the Version Number and compromise illegitimate decreased Rank values.

Abstract-Untraceability of vehicles is an important requirement in future vehicle communications systems. Unfortunately, heartbeat messages used by many safety applications provide a constant stream of location data, and without any protection measures, they make tracking of vehicles easy even for a passive eavesdropper. One commonly known solution is to transmit heartbeats under pseudonyms that are changed regularly in order to obfuscate the trajectory of vehicles. However, this approach is effective only if some silent period is kept during the pseudonym change and several vehicles change their pseudonyms nearly at the same time and at the same location. Unlike previous works that proposed explicit synchronization between a group of vehicles and/or required pseudonym change in a designated physical area (i.e., a static mix zone), we propose a much simpler approach that does not need any explicit cooperation between vehicles and any infrastructure support. Our basic idea is that vehicles should not transmit heartbeat messages when their speed drops below a given threshold, say 30 km/h, and they should change pseudonym during each such silent period. This ensures that vehicles stopping at traffic lights or moving slowly in a traffic jam will all refrain from transmitting heartbeats and change their pseudonyms nearly at the same time and location. Thus, our scheme ensures both silent periods and synchronized pseudonym change in time and space, but it does so in an implicit way. We also argue that the risk of a fatal accident at a slow speed is low, and therefore, our scheme does not seriously impact safetyof-life. In addition, refraining from sending heartbeat messages when moving at low speed also relieves vehicles of the burden of verifying a potentially large amount of digital signatures, and thus, makes it possible to implement vehicle communications with less expensive equipments.

Abstract. Key-tree based private authentication has been proposed by Molnar and Wagner as a neat way to efficiently solve the problem of privacy preserving authentication based on symmetric key cryptography. However, in the key-tree based approach, the level of privacy provided by the system to its members may decrease considerably if some members are compromised. In this paper, we analyze this problem, and show that careful design of the tree can help to minimize this loss of privacy. First, we introduce a benchmark metric for measuring the resistance of the system to a single compromised member. This metric is based on the well-known concept of anonymity sets. Then, we show how the parameters of the key-tree should be chosen in order to maximize the system's resistance to single member compromise under some constraints on the authentication delay. In the general case, when any member can be compromised, we give a lower bound on the level of privacy provided by the system. We also present some simulation results that show that this lower bound is quite sharp. The results of this paper can be directly used by system designers to construct optimal key-trees in practice; indeed, we consider this as the main contribution of our work.

In the past few years, research interest has been increased towards wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and their application in both the military and civil domains. To support scalability in WSNs and increase network lifetime, nodes are often grouped into disjoint clusters. However, secure and reliable clustering, which is critical in WSNs deployed in hostile environments, has gained modest attention so far or has been limited only to fault tolerance. In this paper, we review the state-of-the-art of clustering protocols in WSNs with special emphasis on security and reliability issues. First, we define a taxonomy of security and reliability for cluster head election and clustering in WSNs. Then, we describe and analyze the most relevant secure and reliable clustering protocols. Finally, we propose countermeasures against typical attacks and show how they improve the discussed protocols.

Abstract

In mission critical cyber-physical systems, dependability is an important requirement at all layers of the system architecture. In this paper, we propose protocols that increase the dependability of wireless sensor networks, which are potentially useful building blocks in cyber-physical systems. More specifically, we propose two private aggregator node election protocols, a private data aggregation protocol, and a corresponding private query protocol for sensor networks that allow for secure in-network data aggregation by making it difficult for an adversary to identify and then physically disable the designated aggregator nodes. Our advanced protocols resist strong adversaries that can physically compromise some nodes.