Himani Sikarwar

Himani Sikarwar

Recipient of PM-ECRG Grant | Security and Privacy in IoV/IoT | PUF-based Solutions | AI for Security

Publications

You can also find my articles on my Google Scholar profile.

Conference Papers

SecEdge: Secure edge-computing-based hybrid approach for data collection and searching in IoV

Published in , 2023

Despite numerous research efforts, vehicular networks strive to provide primary facilities for the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs), which are higher data rates, robust connectivity, scalability, security, and privacy facets. In this paper, we proposed a decentralized approach SecEdge to efficiently integrate the Vehicular Cloud’s (V-cloud) concept with the idea of edge-computing in IoV that consider Roadside Connecting Nodes (RSCNs) as an intelligent edge. Furthermore, the heterogeneity and highly dynamic network structure of IoV raise many security and privacy issues while designing the hybrid approach. SecEdge focuses on secure inter-vehicle/intra-vehicle communications using one-way hash functions and secure storage/retrieval of data in/from the upper layer of the architecture. Thus, the sy Read more

Recommended citation: 8
Download Paper

A novel MAC-based authentication scheme (NoMAS) for Internet of Vehicles (IoV)

Published in , 2023

The fully dynamic dense environment of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) and conditions like high traffic jams, collisions, and uneven road conditions increase the communication messages. Consequently, the computation and communication costs of the IoV network are increased. Therefore, IoV needs a lightweight and efficient security solution along with effective communications. Existing state-of-the-art schemes in IoV are generally based on cryptographic methods that use session keys, public keys, elliptic curves, and Message Authentication Codes (MAC). In contrast to the other schemes, MAC-based schemes provide feasible security solutions having high performance with less overhead. The existing MAC-based authentication schemes are vulnerable to the key disclosure issue along with some securit Read more

Recommended citation: 38
Download Paper

Towards lightweight authentication and batch verification scheme in IoV

Published in , 2021

Revolution in the transportation industry was envisioned by self-driving vehicles, with the potential of communication with other vehicles and interaction with other units of the smart environment. With the advent of the Internet of Vehicles(IoV), which is a system that allows communication between vehicles and other static components of the environment and is a convergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), vehicles are considered as an essential part of the network having secure data sensing and processing platforms. Many vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) research focused on the limited set of applications for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and typically implied safe driving, infotainment, and traffic management. However, it still exhibits an enormous scope of enhancement in var Read more

Recommended citation: 30
Download Paper

Secure: Secure and efficient protocol using randomness and edge-computing for drone-assisted internet of vehicles

Published in , 2024

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) faces significant challenges related to secure authentication, efficient communication, and privacy preservation due to the high mobility of vehicles, the need for real-time data processing, varying quality of communication links, and the diverse range of devices and protocols requiring interoperability. These challenges are further complicated by the large-scale, dynamic, and heterogeneous nature of IoV systems. Traditional approaches using Road Side Connecting Nodes (RSCNs) face challenges like limited range, high costs, and single points of failure. Drone-assisted IoV (DIoV) networks address these issues by using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) as mobile edge nodes, enhancing connectivity, extending coverage, and improving adaptability and resilience. To a Read more

Recommended citation: 3
Download Paper

Secure IoT Communications with Optimized AES and Dynamic Threat Modeling on Embedded System

Published in , 2025

This paper presents a hardware cryptographic solution that leverages an InvenSense 6-axis Motion Processing Unit (MPU6050) sensor and an ESP32 microcontroller to address the need for secure and efficient communication in resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices, we introduce a hardware-conscious, lightweight AES-128 with a two-phase (4-bit) S-box and simplified MixColumns over GF(28), integrated with Elliptic Curve Diffie–Hellman (ECDH) for forward-secret key establishment, and a dynamic threat-modeling algorithm that quantifies risk and triggers targeted mitigations. A reconfigurable architecture physically separates block-cipher and hash paths, enabling concurrent operations needed by protocols such as TLS/IPsec. On ESP32, our device reduces encryption time by up to 42.4% co Read more

Recommended citation: 0
Download Paper

DyBatch: Message Prioritization and Priority-driven Dynamic Batch Verification in Large-scale IoV Networks

Published in , 2025

In enhancing transportation, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) facilitates real-time vehicle-infrastructure interactions, improving traffic management and safety, crucial for autonomous vehicle development. However, high-traffic IoV networks face challenges with traditional Batch Message Verification (BMV) methods, often leading to critical alerts being unverified and dropped due to a lack of prioritization. Addressing this, we introduce an enhanced verification model, “DyBatch: Message Prioritization and Dynamic Batch Verification in Large-scale IoV Networks”, designed for Edge-computing enabled IoV (e-IoV) networks. DyBatch effectively tackles message loss by classifying Basic Alert Messages (BAMs) based on urgency through a flag-based mechanism, coupled with a flexible batch size concept t Read more

Recommended citation: 0
Download Paper

MRMH: Multi-Constraint Routing Optimization Using Hybrid Metaheuristics in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks

Published in , 2025

Advancements in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks (VANETs) are crucial for the next generation of intelligent transportation systems. Addressing the complexities of routing and clustering in these networks, our research introduces the Multi-constraint Routing Mechanism using Hybridization (MRMH). This approach innovatively combines the strengths of Grey Wolf Optimization (GWO) and Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP). While GWO is adept at global search, its tendency for premature convergence is effectively countered by SQP's excellence in nonlinear constraint management and local optimization. MRMH further benefits from a novel weighted distance approach and a nonlinear decay formulation, enhancing the balance between exploration and exploitation phases in VANET optimization. Our fitness functi Read more

Recommended citation: 0
Download Paper

Transaction Papers

A lightweight and secure authentication protocol for WSN

Published in 2020 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), 2020

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are gaining traction in day to day applications where data has to be gathered in hostile environments using low computing power sensors. As these sensors are deployed in hostile environments, strong authentication mechanisms are essential to guarantee the safety and security of the data being transferred. But, these strong authentication mechanisms are computationally heavy for the low power sensors. So, there is a need for a lightweight and secure authentication protocol for WSNs. Applications of these sensor ranges from healthcare to oil and exploration. The security of the data being gathered and transmitted is of utmost importance as they can correlate to life and death situations in some instances. So, employment of extremely secure schemes is a necessi Read more

Recommended citation: 6
Download Paper

SMMAP: Secure MAC-based Mutual Authentication Protocol for IoV

Published in Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking, 2023

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is the emerging domain in the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), which facilitate synergic decision from the human being involved in the network and has been a focus of research in the past few years. IoV has the capabilities of large-scale data sensing, collection, and sharing of information between vehicles to the roadside unit and other smart nodes in the environment, allowing dynamic and spontaneous communication. However, these communications in IoV are more prone to security attacks and still face enormous challenges in the aspect of security and privacy. This paper presents an effective and lightweight Secure MAC-based Mutual Authentication Protocol (SMMAP) for IoV and a mechanism for secure communication between vehicles and other smart units of IoV Read more

Recommended citation: 5
Download Paper

Cachein: A secure distributed multi-layer mobility-assisted edge intelligence based caching for internet of vehicles

Published in 2023 IEEE/ACM 23rd International Symposium on Cluster, Cloud and Internet Computing (CCGrid), 2023

This paper investigates the feasibility of cache content prediction and coherence in the context of secure communication and search. We introduce a distributed multi-tier mobility-assisted edge intelligence based caching framework for the Internet of Vehicles (IoVs), called CacheIn. The proposed framework leverages user preferences, data correlations, and mobility information to prefetch content to the IoV edge. To enable content management based on mobility, we propose a novel Normalized Hidden Markov Model (NM-HMM) that anticipates a vehicle's future position. The framework also utilizes a mobility-aware collaborative filtering-based federated learning (FL) technique to enhance cache hit, reduce latency, and protect user privacy. To ensure secure cross-domain data sharing and mitigate th Read more

Recommended citation: 3
Download Paper

EECAAP: Efficient Edge-Computing based Anonymous Authentication Protocol for IoV

Published in 2022 IEEE 29th International Conference on High Performance Computing, Data, and Analytics (HiPC), 2022

Traditional security solutions for the edge have lots of challenges like high power consumption, communication, and computation overhead. These solutions are not feasible for highly dynamic resource-constrained (memory and processing power) Internet of Vehicles (IoV) networks. We can use Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) to address this issue. This paper discusses a new PUF-based anonymous mutual authentication and key exchange protocol for the IoV communication environment by combining unique, unpredictable PUFs and one-way hash functions. In the proposed protocol, a three-layered infrastructure, i.e., vehicle layer, edge computing layer, and cloud layer, is used for the IoV networks to make it efficient and improve the throughput and Quality of Service (QoS). The proposed hybrid syste Read more

Recommended citation: 3
Download Paper

LAAS: lightweight anonymous authentication scheme for universal internet of vehicles (UIOV)

Published in 2022 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), 2022

Over the period, the universal internet of vehicles (UIo V) has acquired considerable attention in enhancing drive safety, traffic management, infotainment. Due to the heteroge-neous communication, it is highly vulnerable to various types of security and privacy attacks. Security and privacy concerns in the UIo V are commonly addressed with central authentication, in which only the registration authority has the power to authenticate vehicles and other UIo V components. Some of the researchers proposed anonymous authentication techniques to re-move this dependency. However, the existing methods for anony-mous authentication endure a very high computation overhead for the certificate and signature validation process, due to which a high rate of message loss happens. In this paper, we propos Read more

Recommended citation: 2
Download Paper

CSBR: A cosine similarity based selective broadcast routing protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks

Published in 2020 ifip networking conference (networking), 2020

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) inflict smart traffic control using information exchange (i.e., warning messages, routing and network discovery messages) with nearby vehicles immediately in a highly dynamic environment. Prior approaches have proposed several routing computations and discovery techniques using prediction, direction aware, and hello message assisted algorithms. However, most of them do not perform adequately in real-life traffic situations and have various concerns i.e., broadcast storming, unpredictable network dynamics, fixed-route life-time problem, non-linear real-world traffic, high routing overhead, and low packet delivery ratio. Clustering architecture in vehicular scenarios improves resource utilization, network scalability and flow of data between communicating v Read more

Recommended citation: 11
Download Paper

LABVS: Lightweight authentication and batch verification scheme for universal internet of vehicles (UIoV)

Published in 2020 IEEE 91st Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2020-Spring), 2020

With the rapid technological advancement of the universal internet of vehicles (UIoV), it becomes crucial to ensure safe and secure communication over the network, in an effort to achieve the implementation objective of UIoV effectively. A UIoV is characterized by highly dynamic topology, scalability, and thus vulnerable to various types of security and privacy attacks (i.e., replay attack, impersonation attack, man-in-middle attack, non-repudiation, and modification). Since the components of UIoV are constrained by numerous factors (e.g., low memory devices, low power), which makes UIoV highly susceptible. Therefore, existing schemes to address the privacy and security facets of UIoV exhibit an enormous scope of improvement in terms of time complexity and efficiency. This paper presents a Read more

Recommended citation: 10
Download Paper

AlcFier: Adaptive self-learning classifier for routing in vehicular ad-hoc network

Published in 2022 IEEE 47th conference on local computer networks (LCN), 2022

This paper presents an adaptive self-learning classifier-based clustering algorithm called AlcFier, to support scalability, enhance the stability of the network topology, and provide efficient routing. We incorporate mobility and channel characteristics (i.e., orientation, adjacency, link availability, queue occupancy, and signal-to-noise ratio) into the clustering approach as a channel-aware metric to provide a new direction to the taxonomy of the approaches employed to handle cluster head election, cluster affiliation, and cluster administration challenges. Experimental results show that AlcFier performs efficiently, improves cluster stability, reduces transmission delays, and improves throughput compared with the state-of-the-art routing protocols. Read more

Recommended citation: 1
Download Paper

An Efficient Lightweight Authentication and Batch Verification Scheme for Universal Internet of Vehicles (UIoV)

Published in 2020 International Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing (IWCMC), 2020

Ensuring secure transmission over the communication channel is a fundamental responsibility to achieve the implementation objective of universal internet of vehicles (UIoV) efficiently. Characteristics like highly dynamic topology and scalability of UIoV makes it more vulnerable to different types of privacy and security attacks. Considerable scope of improvement in terms of time complexity and performance can be observed within the existing schemes that address the privacy and security aspects of UIoV. In this paper, we present an improvised authentication and lightweight batch verification method for security and privacy in UIoV. The suggested method reduces the message loss rate, which occurred due to the response time delay by implementing some low-cost cryptographic operations like on Read more

Recommended citation: 0
Download Paper