Strengthening Privacy Protection in VANETs

Abstract

In the not so far future, vehicles are expected to be able to communicate with each other and with the road infrastructure, to enhance driving experience and support road safety, among others. Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) introduce a number of security challenges to the research community, mainly concerning the tradeoff between the privacy of the drivers and the accountability of misbehaving vehicles. Another challenge is how to satisfy privacy in the presence of an adversary that has access to all communication (a global observer), and that can perform traffic analysis in order to link messages and identify vehicles. In this paper we attempt to address such issues and propose a set of cryptographic mechanisms that balance the tradeoff between privacy and accountability in a VANET. Furthermore, we examine techniques for location privacy against adversaries that perform a Bayesian traffic analysis, and propose a strategy to strengthen location privacy in VANETs.