Verifiable State for Connected Mobility
Exploring how evolving cyber-physical state can remain independently verifiable under privacy and adversarial constraints.
Overview & Research Motivation
At the Cyber Security and Resilience Technology (CyberSaR) laboratory under Prof. Ali Shoker, I investigate verifier-centric security and privacy architectures for connected mobility and cyber-physical systems (CPS).
The research investigates how autonomous vehicles and smart roadside infrastructure (V2X) can maintain state continuity, authenticate sensor streams, and execute multi-party verification without disclosing sensitive positional or proprietary operational telemetry. We model cryptographic attestations, zero-knowledge proofs, authenticated Merkle structures, and revocation protocols evaluated under rigorous simulated adversarial environments.
The Core Systems Problem
- Connected vehicles generate continuous, highly-identifiable telemetry streams. Sharing full sensor data enables third-party verification but destroys user privacy and exposes proprietary OEM operational models.
- Existing centralized vehicle registries fail under intermittent network connectivity and introduce single points of compromise in safety-critical V2X coordination.
Why I Worked on It
"Cyber-physical systems cannot rely on naive Web-style authorization; verification must be fast, resilient to adversarial actors, and capable of operating without an online trusted third party."
My Specific Technical Contributions
- Formulated verifier-centric validation primitives tailored for low-latency V2X communications.
- Designed cryptographic commitment schemes and Merkle-tree state accumulators for dynamic vehicle sensor streams.
- Conducted adversarial stress testing evaluating verifier computational overhead, proof size trade-offs, and resilience to Byzantine nodes.
System Architecture & Verification Pipeline
Verifier-Centric Security Model
Shifts verification burden to lightweight cryptographic validation routines executable on roadside edge units and onboard vehicle ECUs.
Cryptographic State Commitments
Periodically generates zero-knowledge proofs and authenticated data structures over vehicle operational bounds (e.g. speed, maintenance compliance, zone access).
Decentralized Revocation Mechanism
Enables instant revocation of compromised vehicle credentials without full blockchain network consensus latency.
Technical Stack & Tools
Known Limitations
- Generating complex zk-SNARK proofs onboard low-power microcontrollers remains computationally demanding; optimizing proof generation via recursive SNARKs is an active focus.
What I Would Test Next
- Completing formal security proofs under standard universal composability frameworks.
- Preparing comprehensive experimental manuscript for academic conference submission.
Connected Systems & Inquiries
A privacy-preserving mobility data architecture for independently verifiable vehicle lifecycle state without central data silos.
A permissioned Cosmos SDK ledger for connecting supply chain state with MES and digital twin telemetry.
ESP32-based multi-sensor condition monitoring, signal filtering, and anomaly detection for pumps and motors.