A Novel and Practical Pseudonym Change Scheme in VANETs

As a prime target of the quality of privacy in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), location privacy is imperative for VANETs to fully flourish. Although frequent pseudonym changing provides a promising solution for location privacy in VANETs, if the pseudonyms are changed in an improper time or location, such a solution may become invalid. To cope with the issue, in this paper, we present an effective pseudonym changing at social spots (PCS) strategy to achieve the provable location privacy. In particular, we first introduce the social spots where several vehicles may gather, e.g., a road intersection when the traffic light turns red or a free parking lot near a shopping mall. By taking the anonymity set size as the location privacy metric, we then develop two anonymity set analytic models to quantitatively investigate the location privacy that is achieved by the PCS strategy. In addition, we use game-theoretic techniques to prove the feasibility of the PCS strategy in practice. Extensive performance evaluations are conducted to demonstrate that better location privacy can be achieved when a vehicle changes its pseudonyms at some highly social spots and that the proposed PCS strategy can assist vehicles to intelligently change their pseudonyms at the right moment and place.

Communication messages in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) can be used to locate and track vehicles. While tracking can be beneficial for vehicle navigation, it can also lead to threats on location privacy of vehicle user. In this paper, we address the problem of mitigating unauthorized tracking of vehicles based on their broadcast communications, to enhance the user location privacy in VANET. Compared to other mobile networks, VANET exhibits unique characteristics in terms of vehicular mobility constraints, application requirements such as a safety message broadcast period, and vehicular network connectivity. Based on the observed characteristics, we propose a scheme called AMOEBA, that provides location privacy by utilizing the <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">group navigation of vehicles</i> . By simulating vehicular mobility in freeways and streets, the performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated under VANET application constraints and two passive adversary models. We make use of vehicular groups for anonymous access to location based service applications in VANET, for user privacy protection. The robustness of the user privacy provided is considered under various attacks.

In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), a vehicle could be identified and tracked by eavesdropping its messages (e.g., beacons) by an adversary, since these messages contain personal information such as the location of the vehicle. This attack leads to threats on the user's location privacy. Frequent changing pseudonyms are accepted as a solution to protect the location privacy of users in VANETs. In this paper, we propose an efficient pseudonym changing strategy to provide location privacy in VANETs. In addition, we describe a novel tracking attack, that is, the cheating attack. To confront this attack, we develop a cheating detection mechanism. Finally, we show by simulations that the proposed scheme is effective.

In the Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), a vehicle or the vehicle driver could be recognized and tracked by eavesdropping its queries (e.g., beacons) by an adversary, since these quires contain personal information and data such as the queries and location of the vehicle. This attack leads to threats on the vehicles location privacy. The current solutions, exercises Anonymizer, a third trusted party (TTP) in between the LBS and the vehicles. The insertion of the TTP shifts the endangered entity from the LBS to the Anonymizer, regarding security risk, and with the jeopardized anonymizer, the vehicles or vehicles drivers related data will also be at risk. In this paper, we come up with efficient query based dual location privacy in VANETs for V2V and V2I communication. In which we use the circle based dummy generation (CBDG) algorithm along with TTP. Before sending the query to the TTP first we create some dummy location by using CBDG, because we cannot trust completely on TTP architecture. And then we use CASPER as TTP to process the desired query from vehicles to LBS. after receiving the processed query from the LBS, the TTP sends the results back to the drives, where the vehicle drivers finds their desired results. Our results shows that the proposed scheme preserve the location privacy based on the queries at low communication and computational cost.

Ensuring safety in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) requires the connected vehicles to exchange real time accurate road information. However, this necessity risks the privacy and may violate the user's confidentiality. The periodically broadcasted beacon messages containing the vehicle's spatiotemporal road information, and signed using the vehicle's temporal public key are the main factors leading to that risk. Since these factors are fundamental for the correct functioning of a vehicular network and, hence, cant’ be ignored, a solution that preserves the location privacy is needed. In this paper, we aim to preserve the location privacy through a robust pseudonym change strategy that ensures the unlinkability. The proposed method confuses the attacker at the pseudonym update phase to thwart the linkability. It combines the “hiding within the crowd” and the “location obfuscation” techniques. The simulation results of the proposed scheme illustrate a high protection level against a global passive attacker executing semantic and syntactic linking attacks. This is further emphasized through the established comparative study.

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the malicious messages and tampered messages threat other drivers' life or confuse the traffic order possibly. The anonymity has to be traceable when the law enforcement authority wants to figure out the accountabilities about the anonymity. We describe the problem that characterizes the privacy of VANETs and proposes a new anonymous key mechanism with a system architecture based on bilinear paring and elliptic curve cryptography which adapts to VANETs. The anonymous key pair generated by proposed anonymous key mechanism can realize basic security requirements, and protect identity privacy and location privacy in VANETs communication. The data storage cost can also be decreased when the numbers of node grows quickly.

Providing an efficient anonymous authentication scheme in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) with low computational cost is a challenging issue. Even though, there are some existing schemes to provide anonymous authentication, the existing schemes suffer from high computational cost in the certificate and the signature verification process, which leads to high message loss. Therefore, they fail to meet the necessity of verifying hundreds of messages per second in VANETs. In our scheme, we propose an efficient anonymous authentication scheme to avoid malicious vehicles entering into the VANET. In addition, the proposed scheme offers a conditional tracking mechanism to trace the vehicles or roadside units that abuse the VANET. As a result, our scheme revokes the privacy of misbehaving vehicles to provide conditional privacy in a computationally efficient way through which the VANET entities will be anonymous to each other until they are revoked from the VANET system. Moreover, the proposed scheme is implemented and the performance analysis shows that our scheme is computationally efficient with respect to the certificate and the signature verification process by keeping conditional privacy in VANETs.

Securing the Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs) along with appropriate protection of the privacy of drivers or vehicle owners is a very challenging task. Drivers' behavioral tendencies can be reflected in the mobility patterns of the vehicles (rational behavior). Misbehaving vehicles are always threat to safety, VANETs security and privacy. Detection of misbehavior can enhance security and privacy in VANETs. This paper is presenting a mobility pattern based misbehavior detection approach in VANETs. Simulation results show that the Location Anonymous Message based proposed approach has the potential to improve security and maintain privacy in VANETs.

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), vehicles communicate with each other and with roadside units (RSUs) in order to enhance road safety, improve traffic management and provide infotainment services. Along with the growth of VANETs, some challenges are emerging. Although there are many research work on VANETs, cheating attacks are still not well resolved such as selective message relaying attack, faked information reporting attack and resource-consuming attack launched by selfish or malicious participants. To deal with this kind of attacks, we present two novel lightweight security mechanisms by equipped each vehicle's On-Board Unit (OBU) with a small elegant module called TrInc, which is a trusted hardware and composed of only a non-decreasing counter and a key. We observe that TrInc-based method not only can effectively resist against cheating attacks in safety- oriented, convenience-oriented, and commercial-oriented VANET applications, but also significantly defend various aspects of security and privacy in VANETs. Compared with previous works, our proposal features low communication and computation overhead, less memory requirements, and good network scalability.

Medium access control (MAC) is critical for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET). A real commercial VANET system has not come into the market. Different MAC schemes have been proposed to attempt to achieve the expected performance, such as bounded delay, high packet reception rate, security, etc. Space Division Multiple Access (SDMA) is one of the VANET MAC proposals and has been theoretically investigated. However, it has not been studied whether SDMA is realistically feasible in VANET. In this paper, the suitability of SDMA for VANET is studied. The core mechanisms of the proposed SDMA and of the possible SDMA functions for VANET are analyzed and evaluated. Concerns upon practical implementation issues and theoretical limits are presented, based on which the conclusion of the unsuitability of SDMA for VANET is drawn.

A Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET) is a special subset of multi-hop Mobile Ad hoc Networks, in which the vehicles wireless interfaces can communicate with each other, as well as with fixed equipments alongside city roads or highways. Vehicular mobility dynamic characteristics, including high speed, predictable, restricted mobility pattern significantly affect the performance of routing protocols in a real VANET. Based on the existing studies, here we propose a testing network according to the preferential attachment on the degree of nodes and analyze VANET model characteristics for finding out the dynamic topology from the instantaneous degree distribution, instantaneous clustering coefficient and average path length. Analysis and simulation results demonstrate that VANET has a small world network features and is characterized by a truncated scale-free degree distribution with power-law degree distribution. The dynamic topology analysis indicates a possible mechanism of VANET, which might be helpful in the traffic congestion, safety and management.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have the potential to change the way of people drive, travel and so on, in which vehicle can broadcast and forward the message of road condition or emergency. When the received messages are unreliable, they may lead the vehicles to make wrong decisions. To assess how trustworthy the messages are, every vehicle holds the reputation value in the trust-based schemes. In pseudonym-based schemes, vehicles change their pseudonyms by some kind of manner to confuse the trackers. However, the reputation value provides an additional clue to track vehicle when it and the pseudonym change asynchronously. To reconcile the conflict of privacy preservation and reputation evaluation, we propose a distributed trust framework for pseudonym-enabled privacy preservation in VANETs. In this framework, the road side unit assigns the reputation label certificate (RLC) to evaluate the reliability of message for every vehicle in its communication range. To preserve the privacy, the RLC manifests two trust statuses to replace the specific reputation value. All the reputation values of vehicles are stored in the centrical database. To encourage vehicle to follow the rules, the reputation update algorithm is designed with different weights, which achieve the reputation value increasing slowly and decreasing quickly. When RLC of vehicle is revoked, its security and privacy will not be protected. Finally, theoretical analysis and simulations show that our scheme can efficiently meet the requirements of security and privacy in VANETs.

Automatic tuning of communication protocols for vehicular ad hoc networks using metaheuristics

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) have recently received considerable attention. To widely deploy VANETs in the civilian area, it is critical to tackle the secure and privacy challenges in VANETs. In this paper, we propose a scheme referred as IIBV to meet the requirements of security and privacy in VANETs. Specially, we exploit several methods to improve the security of a recent identity-based batch verification scheme for VANETs based on ideal tamper proof devices. In our improved scheme, we assume an attacker cannot recover the secret in a tamper proof device within a reasonable period of time. Vehicles are distributed into different groups maintained by RSUs who may update their private-public keys periodically. The privacy of vehicles is protected by employing pseudo identities and one-time signing keys. As to the efficiency of the scheme, batch verification algorithms are applied to reduce the delay of the message authentications.

Location-based routing is a widely adopted message transmission mechanism in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). While the existing location-based routing schemes of VANETs ignore the location privacy protection of vehicles, leading that the drivers to be tracked, and further threaten the safety of their life and property. To address the above issue, we propose an All-Round and Highly Privacy-Preserving Location-Based Routing for VANETs (called ARPLR). Specifically, ARPLR first proposes a road side unit assisted location management with location privacy protection that prevents the destination vehicle’s location from being leaked by the arbitrary query. Then, a message routing based on location ciphertext with highly privacy protection is designed by order revealing encryption, in which a multi-hop routing between the source and destination vehicle is established only by comparing the encrypted locations between intermediate vehicles. Security analysis shows that, ARPLR can not only effectively provide location privacy protection for the intermediate and the destination vehicles in the whole routing process, but also ensure end-to-end secure communication between the source and destination vehicles. Extensive experiments based on real-road map indicate that, compared with two state-of-the-art solutions, the average transmission delay of ARPLR is respectively reduced by about 18% and 60%, meanwhile the average packet delivery rate also increases about 30% and 2%, respectively.