Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming very popular nowadays due to their wide applicability in areas ranging from package delivery systems to automated military applications. Nevertheless, communication security between a UAV and its base station (BS) is critical for completing its task without leaking sensitive information either to the adversaries or to unauthenticated users. UAVs are especially vulnerable to physical and node tampering attacks. Further, since UAV devices are generally equipped with small batteries and limited memory storage, lightweight security techniques are best suited for them. Addressing these issues, a lightweight mutual authentication scheme based on Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) for UAV-BS authentication is presented in this paper. We present a formal security analysis as well as old-fashioned cryptanalysis to show that our protocol provides various security features such as mutual authentication, user anonymity, etc. and is resilient against many security attacks such as masquerade, replay, node tampering attacks, etc. We also compare the performance of our protocol with state-of-the-art UAV-BS authentication protocols, based on computation, communication and memory storage cost.

With the integration of Wireless Sensor Networks and the Internet of Things, the smart grid is being projected as a solution for the challenges regarding electricity supply in the future. However, security and privacy issues in the consumption and trading of electricity data pose serious challenges in the adoption of the smart grid. To address these challenges, blockchain technology is being researched for applicability in the smart grid. In this paper, important application areas of blockchain in the smart grid are discussed. One use case of each area is discussed in detail, suggesting a suitable blockchain architecture, a sample block structure and the potential blockchain technicalities employed in it. The blockchain can be used for peer-to-peer energy trading, where a credit-based payment scheme can enhance the energy trading process. Efficient data aggregation schemes based on the blockchain technology can be used to overcome the challenges related to privacy and security in the grid. Energy distribution systems can also use blockchain to remotely control energy flow to a particular area by monitoring the usage statistics of that area. Further, blockchain-based frameworks can also help in the diagnosis and maintenance of smart grid equipment. We also discuss several commercial implementations of blockchain in the smart grid. Finally, various challenges to be addressed for integrating these two technologies are discussed.

Vehicular networks promise features such as traffic management, route scheduling, data exchange, entertainment, and much more. With any large-scale technological integration comes the challenge of providing security. Blockchain technology has been a popular choice of many studies for making the vehicular network more secure. Its characteristics meet some of the essential security requirements such as decentralization, transparency, tamper-proof nature, and public audit. This study catalogues some of the notable efforts in this direction over the last few years. We analyze around 75 blockchain-based security schemes for vehicular networks from an application, security, and blockchain perspective. The application perspective focuses on various applications which use secure blockchain-based vehicular networks such as transportation, parking, data sharing/ trading, and resource sharing. The security perspective focuses on security requirements and attacks. The blockchain perspective focuses on blockchain platforms, blockchain types, and consensus mechanisms used in blockchain implementation. We also compile the popular simulation tools used for simulating blockchain and for simulating vehicular networks. Additionally, to give the readers a broader perspective of the research area, we discuss the role of various state-of-the-art emerging technologies in blockchain-based vehicular networks. Finally, we summarize the survey by listing out some common challenges and future research directions in this field.

We are seeing a growth in the number of connected vehicles in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) to achieve the goal of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). This is leading to a connected vehicular network scenario with vehicles continuously broadcasting data to other vehicles on the road and the roadside network infrastructure. The presence of a large number of communicating vehicles greatly increases the number and types of possible anomalies in the network. Existing works provide solutions addressing specific anomalies in the network only. However, since there can be a multitude of anomalies possible in the network, there is a need for better anomaly detection frameworks that can address this unprecedented scenario. In this paper, we propose an anomaly detection framework for VANETs based on deep neural networks (DNNs) using a sequence reconstruction and thresholding algorithm. In this framework, the DNN architectures are deployed on the roadside units (RSUs) which receive the broadcast vehicular data and run anomaly detection tasks to classify a particular message sequence as anomalous or genuine. Multiple DNN architectures are implemented in this experiment and their performance is compared using key evaluation metrics. Performance comparison of the proposed framework is also drawn against the prior work in this area. Our best performing deep learning-based scheme detects anomalous sequences with an accuracy of 98%, a great improvement over the set benchmark.

Modern vehicular electronics is a complex system of multiple Electronic Control Units (ECUs) communicating to provide efficient vehicle functioning. These ECUs communicate using the well-known Controller Area Network (CAN) protocol. The increasing amount of research in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) domain has demonstrated that this protocol is vulnerable to various types of security attacks, compromising the safety of passengers and pedestrians on the roads. Hence, there is a need to develop novel anomaly detection systems to address this problem. This work presents a novel deep learning-based Intrusion Detection System incorporating thresholding and error reconstruction approaches. We train and explore multiple neural network architectures and compare their performance. The proposed anomaly detection system is tested on four kinds of attacks - Denial of Service (DoS), Fuzzy, RPM Spoofing and Gear Spoofing using evaluation metrics such as Precision, Recall and F1-Score. We also present reconstruction-error distribution plots to give a qualitative intuition about the proposed system's ability to distinguish between genuine and anomalous sequences.