Distinguished Professor Michael Sheng and Dr Adnan Mahmood are co-authors of a new book published by Taylor and Francis in New York in December, Trust Management in the Internet of Vehicles. The book explores the new field of security management across the networks used by smart transport systems.
Distinguished Professor Michael Sheng and Dr Adnan Mahmood are co-authors of the recently launched Trust Management in the Internet of Vehicles, the first major publication in this fast-growing field.
“This is a very new domain and our book makes a significant contribution because it is the first to address the issue of trust management within these important networks,” says Professor Sheng, Head of the School of Computing.
The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is a fast-moving technology bringing together the internet, smart transportation, powerful computing and artificial intelligence to make driving safer and manage traffic better.
“IoV networks are a core technology for smart cities, and within the next five years as more autonomous vehicles come on line, we will see these expand globally,” says Professor Sheng.
IoV uses three important storage techniques:
- Cloud computing – remote analysis of big data from vehicles, traffic, safety, and long-term trends.
- Edge computing – allowing vehicles to respond in a microsecond to navigation and safety alerts by processing data in the vehicle.
- Fog computing – a middle data processing layer between car and cloud, improving efficiency in traffic management and safety systems.
“For IoV networks to be effective, the messages between cars and systems must be fast and secure, because just one breach or bad message could cause harm to pedestrians, passengers, or infrastructure, and making these networks trustworthy lets them reliably tell good messages from bad ones,” Professor Sheng says.
The book explores how trust can make the IoV stronger and safer, how trust can be measured, and how to tell good and bad players apart. It also covers some of the big challenges these networks still face and outlines models to address them.
What trust means in IoV networks
Dr Mahmood, a lecturer in computing, networking and the Internet of Things, says, “In computer networks, we adopt the human concept of trust – the level of confidence we have in another person’s honesty, integrity and reliability – and apply that to interactions between devices within that network."
The authors designed trust models that can scale to very large, city-wide IoV networks, and to widespread networks across regional and rural areas.
“Our trust models respond to dynamic behaviour patterns,” says Dr Mahmood. "They can cater for a vehicle as it joins and leaves a network in an area or road segment, and as it dynamically joins IoV networks in the city, or the suburbs or on country roads.”
This security technique works far better in the highly dynamic, fast-moving demands of IoV than conventional, password- or certificate-style, cryptographic-based solutions, he adds.
The research breakthrough outlined in this book provides a blueprint for engineers and planners designing an IoV network in the future, to build in security measures that respond to attacks from both outside and within the network.
“This solves the problem where malicious players try to change their behaviour to get around network defences,” Dr Mahmood says. “Internal attacks are the most difficult to tackle, but by establishing a scalable trust model, we can identify vulnerabilities within a network and limit the risk.”
Professor Sheng and Dr Mahmood wrote the book with co-authors Dr Wei Emma Zhang from the University of Adelaide and Associate Professor Sira Yongchareon from Auckland University of Technology.
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