This poster reports on a project to improve privacy in the presence of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication. Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) enable communication and information sharing between a vehicle and other entities using V2X. While there are many (emerging) applications for such messages, they also compromise privacy. Though pseudonym change strategies have been developed, privacy attacks have been demonstrated. This paper reports on a study that shows that by adding a small random noise to the length and widths of cars in V2X messages, these attacks can be defeated without negatively impacting the applications of these messages.

Wearable devices are emerging as effective modalities for the collection of individuals’ data. While this data can be leveraged for use in several areas ranging from health-care to crime investigation, storing and securely accessing such information while preserving privacy and detecting any tampering attempts are significant challenges. This paper describes a decentralized system that ensures an individual’s privacy, maintains an immutable log of any data access, and provides decentralized access control management. Our proposed framework uses a custom permissioned blockchain protocol to securely log data transactions from wearable devices in the blockchain ledger. We have implemented a proof-of-concept for our framework, and our preliminary evaluation is summarized to demonstrate our proposed framework’s capabilities. We have also discussed various application scenarios of our privacy-preserving model using blockchain and proof-of-authority. Our research aims to detect data tampering attempts in data sharing scenarios using a thorough transaction log model.

Modern hardware typically is characterized by a multitude of interacting physical components and software mechanisms. To address this complexity, security analysis should be modular: We would like to formulate and prove security properties of individual components, and then deduce the security of the overall design (encompassing hardware and software) from the security of the components. While this seems like an elusive goal, we argue that this is essentially the only feasible way to provide rigorous security analysis of modern hardware.This paper investigates the possibility of using the Universally Composable (UC) security framework towards this aim. The UC framework has been devised and successfully used in the theoretical cryptography community to study and formally prove security of arbitrarily interleaving cryptographic protocols. In particular, a sophisticated analytical toolbox has been developed using this framework. We provide an introduction to this frame-work, and investigate, via a number of examples, ways by which this framework can be used to facilitate a novel type of modular security analysis. This analysis applies to combined hardware and software systems, and investigates their security against attacks that combine both physical and digital steps.