Heekuck Oh

Rethinking Vehicular Communications: Merging VANET with cloud computing

Despite the surge in Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork (VANET) research, future high-end vehicles are expected to under-utilize the on-board computation, communication, and storage resources. Olariu et al. envisioned the next paradigm shift from conventional VANET to Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) by merging VANET with cloud computing. But to date, in the literature, there is no solid architecture for cloud computing from VANET standpoint. In this paper, we put forth the taxonomy of VANET based cloud computing. It is, to the best of our knowledge, the first effort to define VANET Cloud architecture. Additionally we divide VANET clouds into three architectural frameworks named Vehicular Clouds (VC), Vehicles using Clouds (VuC), and Hybrid Vehicular Clouds (HVC). We also outline the unique security and privacy issues and research challenges in VANET clouds.

Adaptation of the relaxation method for learning in bidirectional associative memory

An iterative learning algorithm called PRLAB is described for the discrete bidirectional associative memory (BAM). Guaranteed recall of all training pairs is ensured by PRLAB. The proposed algorithm is significant in many ways. Unlike many existing iterative learning algorithms, PRLAB is not based on the gradient descent technique. It is a novel adaptation from the well-known relaxation method for solving a system of linear inequalities. The algorithm is very fast. Learning 200 random patterns in a 200-200 BAM takes only 20 epochs on the average. PRLAB is highly insensitive to learning parameters and the initial configuration of a BAM. It also offers high scalability for large applications by providing the same high performance when the number of training patterns are increased in proportion to the size of the BAM. An extensive performance analysis of the new learning algorithm is included.

Conditional privacy preserving security protocol for NFC applications

In recent years, various mobile terminals equipped with NFC (Near Field Communication) have been released. The combination of NFC with smart devices has led to widening the utilization range of NFC. It is expected to replace credit cards in electronic payment, especially. In this regard, security issues need to be addressed to vitalize NFC electronic payment. The NFC security standards currently being applied require the use of users public key at a fixed value in the process of key agreement. The relevance of the message occurs in the fixed elements such as the public key of NFC. An attacker can create a profile based on users public key by collecting the associated messages. Through the created profile, users can be exposed and their privacy can be compromised. In this paper, we propose conditional privacy protection methods based on pseudonyms to solve these problems. In addition, PDU (Protocol Data Unit) for conditional privacy is defined. Users can inform the other party that they will communicate according to the protocol proposed in this paper by sending the conditional privacy preserved PDU through NFC terminals. The proposed method succeeds in minimizing the update cost and computation overhead by taking advantage of the physical characteristics of NFC1.

Cooperation-Aware VANET Clouds: Providing Secure Cloud Services to Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract —Over the last couple of years, traditional VANET (Vehicular Ad Hoc NETwork) evolved into VANET-based clouds. From the VANET standpoint, applications became richer by virtue of the boom in automotive telematics and infotainment technologies. Nevertheless, the research community and industries are concerned about the under-utilization of rich computation, communication, and storage resources in middle and high-end vehicles. This phenomenon became the driving force for the birth of VANET-based clouds. In this paper, we envision a novel application layer of VANET-based clouds based on the cooperation of the moving cars on the road, called CaaS (Cooperation as a Service). CaaS is divided into TIaaS (Traffic Information as a Service), WaaS (Warning as a Service), and IfaaS (Infotainment as a Service). Note, however, that this work focuses only on TIaaS and WaaS. TIaaS provides vehicular nodes, more precisely subscribers, with the fine-grained traffic information constructed by CDM (Cloud Decision Module) as a result of the cooperation of the vehicles on the roads in the form of mobility vectors. On the other hand, WaaS provides subscribers with potential warning messages in case of hazard situations on the road. Communication between the cloud infrastructure and the vehicles is done through GTs (Gateway Terminals), whereas GTs are physically realized through RSUs (Road-Side Units) and vehicles with 4G Internet access. These GTs forward the coarse-grained cooperation from vehicles to cloud and fine-grained traffic information and warnings from cloud to vehicles (subscribers) in a secure, privacy-aware fashion. In our proposed scheme, privacy is conditionally preserved wherein the location and the identity of the cooperators are preserved by leveraging the modified location-based encryption and, in case of any dispute, the node is subject to revocation. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed scheme is the first effort to offshore the extended traffic view construction function and warning messages dissemination function to the cloud.

A new hash-based RFID mutual authentication protocol providing enhanced user privacy protection

The recently proposed Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) authentication protocol based on a hashing function can be divided into two types according to the type of information used for authentication between a reader and a tag: either a value fixed or one updated dynamically in a tag. In this study we classify the RFID authentication protocol into a static ID-based and a dynamic-ID based protocol and then analyze their respective strengths and weaknesses and the previous protocols in the static/dynamic ID-based perspectives. Also, we define four security requirements that must be considered in designing the RFID authentication protocol including mutual authentication, confidentiality, indistinguishability and forward security. Based on these requirements, we suggest a secure and efficient mutual authentication protocol. The proposed protocol is a dynamic ID-based mutual authentication protocol designed to meet requirements of both indistinguishability and forward security by ensuring the unlinkability of tag responses among sessions. Thus, the protocol can provide more strengthened user privacy compared to previous protocols and recognizes a tag efficiently in terms of the operation quantity of tags and database.

Towards Privacy Aware Pseudonymless Strategy for Avoiding Profile Generation in VANET

Inspiring from MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks), VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks) employing vehicles as nodes, provide a wide range of applications in transportation system. The security of VANET has been a hot topic among the research community. VANETs must meet the basic security requirements such as authentication, integrity, confidentiality and privacy. In VANET, vehicles send beacon messages periodically every 100-300ms which carry speed and position information used for safe driving. The privacy of user is abused by profile generation where the adversary makes movement profiles against the vehicle using the identity information in the beacon. We outline the strategies using pseudonyms to provide privacy of user. After finding out deficiencies in pseudonym-based schemes, we propose a pseudonymless strategy to avoid profilation. In our scheme, we assume that each car is equipped with TRH (Tamper-Resistant Hardware) carrying out secure operations. Our proposed scheme assures the avoidance of profile generation without using mix zones and silent periods. We show that our proposed scheme is computationally efficient and less bandwidth consuming than other systems.

TIaaS: Secure Cloud-assisted Traffic Information Dissemination in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In the recent past, a new concept termed as VANET-based clouds evolved from traditional VANET incorporating both VANET and cloud computing technologies in order to provide vehicle drivers, passengers, and consumers with safe, reliable, and infotainment-rich services while driving on the roads. In this paper, we use a framework of VANET-based clouds proposed by Hussain et al. namely VuC (VANET using Clouds) and define another layer TIaaS (Traffic Information as a Service) atop the cloud computing stack. TIaaS layer provides vehicular nodes (more precisely subscribers) with fine-grained traffic information in a secure way. Additionally our proposed scheme provides security, privacy, and conditional anonymity which are of prime concern in VANET clouds.

Vehicle Witnesses as a Service: Leveraging Vehicles as Witnesses on the Road in VANET Clouds

Inspired by the dramatic evolution of VANE clouds, this paper proposes a new VANET-cloud service called VWaaS (Vehicle Witnesses as a Service) in which vehicles moving on the road serve as anonymous witnesses of designated events such as a terrorist attack or a deadly accident. When confronted the events, a group of vehicles with mounted cameras collaborate with roadside stationary cameras to take pictures of the site of interest (SoI) around them, and send the pictures to the cloud infrastructure anonymously. The pictures are sent to the cloud in a way that the privacy of the senders can be protected, and kept by the cloud for future investigation. However, for the case that the pictures are used as an evidence of court trial, we made the privacy protection to be conditional and thus can be revoked by authorized entity(s) if necessary.

On security and privacy issues of fog computing supported Internet of Things environment

Recently, the concept of Internet of Things (IoT) is attracting much attention due to the huge potential. IoT uses the Internet as a key infrastructure to interconnect numerous geographically diversified IoT nodes which usually have scare resources, and therefore cloud is used as a key back-end supporting infrastructure. In the literature, the collection of the IoT nodes and the cloud is collectively called as an IoT cloud. Unfortunately, the IoT cloud suffers from various drawbacks such as huge network latency as the volume of data which is being processed within the system increases. To alleviate this issue, the concept of fog computing is introduced, in which foglike intermediate computing buffers are located between the IoT nodes and the cloud infrastructure to locally process a significant amount of regional data. Compared to the original IoT cloud, the communication latency as well as the overhead at the backend cloud infrastructure could be significantly reduced in the fog computing supported IoT cloud, which we will refer as IoT fog. Consequently, several valuable services, which were difficult to be delivered by the traditional IoT cloud, can be effectively offered by the IoT fog. In this paper, however, we argue that the adoption of IoT fog introduces several unique security threats. We first discuss the concept of the IoT fog as well as the existing security measures, which might be useful to secure IoT fog. Then, we explore potential threats to IoT fog.

A new electronic check system with reusable refunds

Abstract.This paper presents a new online check system that solves the reusability problem of refunds in existing systems using the partially blind signature. The clear part of the signature is used to encode the face value of a check. In our system, refunds can be reused in payment in the same way as withdrawn checks without any limitation. We also use a one-time secret key as the serial number of a check to increase the efficiency of payment. The new system provides multiple offline shopping sessions to minimize the number of online messages. During the offline session, we use a one-way accumulator to construct a proof of payment. The security and the atomicity of the system is also discussed.