Sanaa Taha

Secure and privacy-preserving AMI-utility communications via LTE-A networks

In smart grid Automatic Metering Infrastructure (AMI) networks, smart meters should send consumption data to the utility company (UC) for grid state estimation. Creating a new infrastructure to support this communication is costly and may take long time which may delay the deployment of the AMI networks. The Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks can be used to support the communications between the AMI networks and the UC. However, since these networks are owned and operated by private companies, the UC cannot ensure the security and privacy of the communications. Moreover, the data sent by the AMI networks have different characteristics and requirements than most of the existing applications in LTE-A networks. For example, there is a strict data delay requirement, data is short and transmitted every short time, data is sent at known/predefined time slots, and there is no handover. In this paper, we study enabling secure and privacy preserving AMI-UC communications via LTE-A networks. The proposed scheme aims to achieve essential security requirements such as authentication, confidentiality, key agreement and data integrity without trusting the LTE-A networks. Furthermore, an aggregation scheme is used to protect the privacy of the electricity consumers. It can also reduce the amount of required bandwidth which can reduce the communication cost. Our evaluations have demonstrated that our proposals are secure and require low communication/computational overhead.

Secure and efficient uniform handover scheme for LTE-A networks

In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient handover scheme for the Long Term Evolution-Advanced (LTE-A) networks. The proposed scheme does not trust the basestations because they may be accessible to attackers and operated by subscribers, rather than service providers. First, we propose a registration procedure to enable the base-stations to authenticate and register with the Home Subscriber Server (HSS). Then, we propose a procedure to enable the user equipment (UEs) to authenticate and exchange keys with the Mobility Management Entity (MME) and base-stations. Finally, we propose a secure and fast handover procedure. To reduce the handover latency, the HSS is not involved and the computation overhead on the UEs is very low. The proposed scheme is uniform in the sense that one procedure can be used for all handover scenarios. Our security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme can thwart well-known attacks such as impersonation, man in the middle, packet replay, etc. The proposed key agreement procedures can achieve backward/forward secrecy, where attackers cannot derive the past or future session keys. Our performance evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed handover scheme is fast because it needs few computations and exchanges few number of packets. This is important to improve the quality of service, avoid call termination, and service disruption. Moreover, the proposed scheme imposes minimal overhead on the mobile nodes, which is very desirable because these nodes usually have low computational power and energy.

A novel secured traffic monitoring system for VANET

There is a growing need for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), in which vehicles communicate with each other (i. e., Vehicle to Vehicle, V2V) or with the infrastructure (i. e., Vehicle to Infrastructure, V2I) on a wireless basis. This paper presents an improved traffic monitoring system for VANET applications via a proposed security scheme. Specifically, the proposed model analyzes the monitored scene, and automatically generates monitoring reports, which contain the current time, current location, and traffic event type (which may be an accident, crowd, demonstration or protest events). Additionally, two schemes have been proposed: one is detecting vehicle accident using image processing techniques, and the other is detecting both transmitted fake reports about the road and the malicious cars driver, who transmits those fake reports. The security scheme achieves source authentication, data confidentiality, driver anonymity, and non-repudiation security services. Also the monitoring system achieves 85.41% average accuracy and 84.093 msec. average execution time with only 0.011% increase in computation overhead for applying the security scheme.

Anonymity and Location Privacy for Mobile IP Heterogeneous Networks

In transmitting mobile IPv6 binding update messages, both the mobile node’s (MN) Home Address (HoA) and Care of Address (CoA) are transmitted as plain-text, hence they can be revealed by network entities and attackers.

Physical-Layer Location Privacy for Mobile Public Hotspots in a NEMO-Based VANET

As an extension of MIPv6, NEMO protocol works appropriately for a scenario such as the one depicted in Fig. 4.1, where a Wi-Fi hotspot is deployed in public transportation (such as buses, trains, shuttles) and called a NEMO-based VANET [1, 2, 3, 4]. In such networks, the OBU inside a vehicle also works as a Mobile Router (MR) to support a group of Mobile Network Nodes (MNNs), such as cell phones and PDAs, located inside the vehicle with required communications.

Multihop Mobile Authentication for PMIP Networks

An important requirement for current mobile wireless networks, such as VANETs, is that they be able to provide ubiquitous and seamless IP communications in a secure way. Moreover, these networks are envisioned to support multihop communications, in which intermediate nodes help to relay packets between two peers in the network. Therefore, in infrastructure-connected multihop mobile networks, the connection from the mobile node (MN) to the point of attachment may traverse multiple hops (Fig. 3.1.