Broadband Communications Research (BBCR) Group

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

Office: EIT4112, Telephone: 888-4567 x 37451

Email: rxlu (at) bbcr.uwaterloo.ca

Gmail: rxlu.cn (at) gmail.com

1. On May 9, 2012, I was informed that I have received the Governor General's Gold Medal this year.

2. Our paper "SPOC: A Secure and Privacy-preserving Opportunistic Computing Framework for Mobile-Healthcare Emergency" has been formally accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems in April 2012. [ by running "java -jar PPSPC.jar"]

3. Our paper "EPPA: An Efficient and Privacy-Preserving Aggregation Scheme for Secure Smart Grid Communications" has been formally accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems in Feb. 2012.

4. On Jan. 3, 2012, I was informed that I have received the Research In Motion (RIM) Graduate Scholarship, 2012.

5. Our paper "Simple three-party key exchange protocol" has been ranked the top most cited articles of Elsevier Journal Computers & Security since 2007.

6. Rongxing Lu, Xu Li, Xiaodong Lin, Xiaohui Liang and Xuemin (Sherman) Shen, "GRS: The Green, Reliability, and Security of Emerging Machine to Machine Communications", IEEE Communications Magazine - Feature Topic on Recent Progress in Machine to Machine Communications, Vol. 49, Issue 4, pp. 28 - 35. [In the April 2011 list of the ten most popular articles published in ComSoc periodicals viewed online]

7. Rongxing Lu has been invited to serve as an Editorial Board Member of KSII Transactions on Internet and Information System (TIIS) and International Journal of Privacy and Health Information Management (IJPHIM) since 2012, Parallel and Distributed Computing and Network , and International Journal on Communications Antenna and Propagation since 2011.

Research Focus :: Secure & Privacy Preserving VANETs and Applications

1. [LLLLLCS12] R. Lu, X. Lin, T.H. Luan, X. Liang, X. Li, L. Chen, and X. Shen, "PReFilter: An Efficient Privacy-preserving Relay Filtering Scheme for Delay Tolerant Networks", Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'12, Orlando, Florida, USA, March 25-30, 2012.

Contributions: Without direct path, information delivery in sparse delay tolerant networks (DTNs) typically relies on intermittent relays, making the transmission not only unreliable but also time consuming. To make the matter even worse, the source nodes may transmit some encrypted ``junk" information, similar as the spam emails in current mail systems, to the destinations; without effective control, the delivery of encrypted junk information would significantly consume the precious resource of DTN and accordingly throttle the network efficiency. On addressing this challenging issue, we propose PReFilter, an efficient privacy-preserving relay filter scheme to stop the relay of encrypted junk information early in DTNs. In PReFilter, each node maintains a specific filtering policy based on its interests, and distributes this policy to a group of ``friends" in the network in advance. By apply the filtering policy, the friends can filter the junk packets which are heading to the node during the relay. Note that the keywords in the filtering policy may disclose the node's interest/preference to some extent, harming the privacy of nodes, a privacy-preserving filtering policy distribution technique is introduced, which will keep the sensitive keywords secret in the filtering policy. Through detailed security analysis, we show that PReFilter can prevent strong privacy-curious adversaries from learning the filtering keywords, and discourage a weak privacy-curious friend to guess the filtering keywords from the filtering policy. In addition, with extensive simulations, we demonstrate that PReFilter is not only effective in the filtering of junk packets but also significantly improve the network performance with the dramatically reduced delivery cost due to the junk packets.

2. [LLLS11] X. Lin, R. Lu, X. Liang and X. Shen, "STAP: A Social-Tier-Assisted Packet Forwarding Protocol for Achieving Receiver-Location Privacy Preservation in VANETs", Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'11, Shanghai, China, April 10-15, 2011.

Contributions: Receiver-location privacy is an important security requirement in privacy-preserving Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), yet the unavailable receiver's location information makes many existing packet forwarding protocols inefficient in VANETs. To tackle this challenging issue, in this paper, we propose an efficient social-tier-assisted packet forwarding protocol, called STAP, for achieving receiver-location privacy preservation in VANETs. Specifically, by observing the phenomena that vehicles often visit some social spots, such as well-traversed shopping malls and busy intersections in a city environment, we deploy storage-rich Roadside Units (RSUs) at social spots and form a virtual social tier with them. Then, without knowing the receiver's exact location information, a packet can be first forwarded and disseminated in the social tier. Later, once the receiver visits one of social spots, it can successfully receive the packet. Detailed security analysis shows that the proposed STAP protocol can protect the receiver's location privacy against an active global adversary, and achieve vehicle's conditional privacy preservation as well. In addition, performance evaluation via extensive simulations demonstrates its efficiency in terms of high delivery ratio and low average delay.

3. [LLS10] R. Lu, X. Lin, and X. Shen, "SPRING: A Social-based Privacy-preserving Packet Forwarding Protocol for Vehicular Delay Tolerant Networks", Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'10, San Diego, California, USA, March 14 - 19, 2010. (>=30 citations from Google Scholar)

Contributions: In this paper, we propose a social-based privacypreserving packet forwarding protocol, called SPRING, for vehicular delay tolerant networks (DTNs). With SPRING, Roadside Units (RSUs) deployed along the roadside can assist in packet forwarding to achieve highly reliable transmissions. In specific, we first heuristically define how to evaluate each traffic intersection's social degree in a vehicular DTN. Based on the social degree information, we then strategically place RSUs at some high-social intersections. As a result, these RSUs can provide tremendous assistance in temporarily storing packets and helping packet forwarding to achieve high delivery ratio. Performance evaluations via extensive simulations demonstrate the SPRING's efficiency. In addition, detailed security analyses show that the proposed SPRING can achieve conditional privacy preservation and resist most attacks existing in vehicular DTNs.

4. [LLZHS08] R. Lu, X. Lin, H. Zhu, P.H. Ho and X. Shen, "ECPP: Efficient Conditional Privacy Preservation Protocol for Secure Vehicular Communications", Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'08, Phoenix, AZ, USA, April 14-18, 2008. (>=150 citations from Google Scholar)

Contributions: In this paper, we introduce an efficient conditional privacy preservation (ECPP) protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) to address the issue on anonymous authentication for safety messages with authority traceability. The proposed protocol is characterized by the generation of on-the-fly short-time anonymous keys between On-Board Units (OBUs) and Roadside Units (RSUs), which can provide fast anonymous authentication and privacy tracking while minimizing the required storage for short-time anonymous keys. We demonstrate the merits gained by the proposed protocol through extensive analysis.

5. [LLZS09] R. Lu, X. Lin, H. Zhu, and X. Shen, "SPARK: A New VANET-based Smart Parking Scheme for Large Parking Lots", Proc. IEEE INFOCOM'09, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 19-25, 2009. (>=40 citations from Google Scholar)

Contributions: Searching for a vacant parking space in a congested area or a large parking lot and preventing auto theft are major concerns to our daily lives. In this paper, we propose a new smart parking scheme for large parking lots through vehicular communication. The proposed scheme can provide the drivers with real-time parking navigation service, intelligent antitheft protection, and friendly parking information dissemination. Performance analysis via extensive simulations demonstrates its efficiency and practicality.

6. [LLZZHS08] X. Lin, R. Lu, C. Zhang, H. Zhu, P.H. Ho, and X. Shen, "Security in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks", IEEE Communications Magazine, Vol. 46, No. 4, 88-95, 2008. (>=90 citations from Google Scholar)

Contributions: Vehicular communication networking is a promising approach to facilitating road safety, traffic management, and infotainment dissemination for drivers and passengers. One of the ultimate goals in the design of such networking is to resist various malicious abuses and security attacks. In this article we first review the current standardization process, which covers the methods of providing security services and preserving driver privacy for Wireless Access in Vehicular Environments (WAVE) applications. We then address two fundamental issues, certificate revocation and conditional privacy preservation, for making the standards practical. In addition, a suite of novel security mechanisms are introduced for achieving secure certificate revocation and conditional privacy preservation, which are considered among the most challenging design objectives in vehicular ad hoc networks.

7. Bibliography on Secure Vehicular Communications

Contributions: It would be useful to create an up-to-date bibliography on secure vehicular communications and make it available on the Internet. So we try our best to maintain a complete list of all secure vehicular ad hoc networks.