In advanced metering infrastructure (AMI), smart meters (SMs) are installed at the consumer side to send fine-grained power consumption readings periodically to the system operator (SO) for load monitoring, energy management, and billing. However, fraudulent consumers launch electricity theft cyber-attacks by reporting false readings to reduce their bills illegally. These attacks do not only cause financial losses but may also degrade the grid performance because the readings are used for grid management. To identify these attackers, the existing schemes employ machine-learning models using the consumers’ fine-grained readings, which violates the consumers’ privacy by revealing their lifestyle. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheme that enables the SO to detect electricity theft, compute bills, and monitor load while preserving the consumers’ privacy. The idea is that SMs encrypt their readings using functional encryption, and the SO uses the ciphertexts to (i) compute the bills following dynamic pricing approach, (ii) monitor the grid load, and (iii) evaluate a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent consumers, without being able to learn the individual readings to preserve consumers’ privacy. We adapted a functional encryption scheme so that the encrypted readings are aggregated for billing and load monitoring and only the aggregated value is revealed to the SO. Also, we exploited the inner-product operations on encrypted readings to evaluate a machine-learning model to detect fraudulent consumers. Real dataset is used to evaluate our scheme, and our evaluations indicate that our scheme is secure and can detect fraudulent consumers accurately with low communication and computation overhead.

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) have the potential to enable the next-generation Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS). In ITS, data contributed by vehicles can build a spatio-temporal view of traffic statistics, which can improve road safety and reduce slow traffic and jams. To preserve drivers’ privacy, vehicles should use multiple pseudonyms instead of only one identity. However, vehicles may exploit this abundance of pseudonyms and launch Sybil attacks by pretending to be multiple vehicles. Then, these Sybil (or fake) vehicles report false data, e.g., to create fake congestion or pollute traffic management data. In this article, we propose a Sybil attack detection scheme using proofs of work and location. The idea is that each road side unit (RSU) issues a signed time-stamped tag as a proof for the vehicle’s anonymous location. Proofs sent from multiple consecutive RSUs are used to create a trajectory which is used as vehicle anonymous identity. Also, contributions from one RSU are not enough to create trajectories, rather the contributions of several RSUs are needed. By this way, attackers need to compromise an infeasible number of RSUs to create fake trajectories. Moreover, upon receiving the proof of location from an RSU, the vehicle should solve a computational puzzle by running proof of work (PoW) algorithm. Then, it should provide a valid solution (proof of work) to the next RSU before it can obtain a proof of location. Using the PoW can prevent the vehicles from creating multiple trajectories in case of low-dense RSUs. To report an event, the vehicle has to send the latest trajectory to an event manager. Then, the event manager uses a matching technique to identify the trajectories sent from Sybil vehicles. The scheme depends on the fact that the Sybil trajectories are bounded physically to one vehicle, and therefore, their trajectories should overlap. Extensive experiments and simulations demonstrate that our scheme achieves high detection rate of Sybil attacks with low false negative and acceptable communication and computation overhead.

As complex autonomous systems become increasingly ubiquitous, their deployment and integration into our daily lives will become a significant endeavor. Human–machine trust relationship is now acknowledged as one of the primary aspects that characterize a successful integration. In the context of human–machine interaction (HMI), proper use of machines and autonomous systems depends both on the human and machine counterparts. On one hand, it depends on how well the human relies on the machine regarding the situation or task at hand based on willingness and experience. On the other hand, it depends on how well the machine carries out the task and how well it conveys important information on how the job is done. Furthermore, proper calibration of trust for effective HMI requires the factors affecting trust to be properly accounted for and their relative importance to be rightly quantified. In this article, the functional understanding of human–machine trust is viewed from two perspectives—human-centric and machine- centric. The human aspect of the discussion outlines factors, scales, and approaches, which are available to measure and calibrate human trust. The discussion on the machine aspect spans trustworthy artificial intelligence, built-in machine assurances, and ethical frameworks of trustworthy machines.

In advanced metering infrastructure (AMI) networks, smart meters installed at the consumer side should report fine-grained power consumption readings (every few minutes) to the system operator for billing, real-time load monitoring, and energy management. On the other hand, AMI networks are vulnerable to cyber-attacks where malicious consumers report false (low) electricity consumption to reduce their bills in an illegal way. Therefore, it is imperative to develop schemes to accurately identify the consumers that steal electricity by reporting false electricity usage. Most of the existing schemes rely on machine learning for electricity theft detection using the consumers’ fine-grained power consumption meter readings. However, this fine-grained data that is used for electricity theft decetion, load monitoring, and billing can also be misused to infer sensitive information regarding the consumers such as whether they are on travel, the appliances they use, etc. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving electricity theft detection scheme for AMI network and we refer to it as PPETD. Our scheme allows system operators to identify the electricity thefts, monitor the loads, and compute electricity bills efficiently using masked fine-grained meter readings without violating the consumers’ privacy. PPETD uses secret sharing to allow the consumers to send masked readings to the system operator such that these readings can be aggregated for the purpose of monitoring and billing. In addition, secure two-party protocols using arithmetic and binary circuits are executed by the system operator and each consumer to evaluate a generalized convolutionalneural network model on the reported masked fine-grained power consumption readings for the purpose of electricity theft detection. An extensive analysis on real datasets is performed to evaluate the security and the performance of PPETD. Our results confirm that our scheme is accurate in detecting fraudulent consumers with privacy preservation and acceptable communication and computation overhead.

Recently, Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) have gained extensive attention from both academia and industry. AVs are a complex system composed of many subsystems, making them a typical target for attackers. Therefore, the firmware of the different subsystems needs to be updated to the latest version by the manufacturer to fix bugs and introduce new features, e.g., using security patches. In this paper, we propose a distributed firmware update scheme for the AVs' subsystems, leveraging blockchain and smart contract technology. A consortium blockchain made of different AVs manufacturers is used to ensure the authenticity and integrity of firmware updates. Instead of depending on centralized third parties to distribute the new updates, we enable AVs, namely distributors, to participate in the distribution process and we take advantage of their mobility to guarantee high availability and fast delivery of the updates. To incentivize AVs to distribute the updates, a reward system is established that maintains a credit reputation for each distributor account in the blockchain. A zero-knowledge proof protocol is used to exchange the update in return for a proof of distribution in a trustless environment. Moreover, we use attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme to ensure that only authorized AVs will be able to download and use a new update. Our analysis indicates that the additional cryptography primitives and exchanged transactions do not affect the operation of the AVs network. Also, our security analysis demonstrates that our scheme is efficient and secure against different attacks.