Vehicle witnesses as a service: Leveraging vehicles as witnesses on the road in VANET clouds

Abstract

Inspired by the dramatic evolution of VANE clouds, this paper proposes a new VANET-cloud service called VWaaS (Vehicle Witnesses as a Service) in which vehicles moving on the road serve as anonymous witnesses of designated events such as a terrorist attack or a deadly accident. When confronted the events, a group of vehicles with mounted cameras collaborate with roadside stationary cameras to take pictures of the site of interest (SoI) around them, and send the pictures to the cloud infrastructure anonymously. The pictures are sent to the cloud in a way that the privacy of the senders can be protected, and kept by the cloud for future investigation. However, for the case that the pictures are used as an evidence of court trial, we made the privacy protection to be conditional and thus can be revoked by authorized entity(s) if necessary. © 2013 IEEE.