Towards privacy aware pseudonymless strategy for avoiding profile generation in VANET

Abstract

Inspiring from MANET (Mobile Ad hoc NETworks), VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks) employing vehicles as nodes, provide a wide range of applications in transportation system. The security of VANET has been a hot topic among the research community. VANETs must meet the basic security requirements such as authentication, integrity, confidentiality and privacy. In VANET, vehicles send beacon messages periodically every 100-300ms which carry speed and position information used for safe driving. The privacy of user is abused by profile generation where the adversary makes movement profiles against the vehicle using the identity information in the beacon. We outline the strategies using pseudonyms to provide privacy of user. After finding out deficiencies in pseudonym-based schemes, we propose a pseudonymless strategy to avoid profilation. In our scheme, we assume that each car is equipped with TRH (Tamper-Resistant Hardware) carrying out secure operations. Our proposed scheme assures the avoidance of profile generation without using mix zones and silent periods. We show that our proposed scheme is computationally efficient and less bandwidth consuming than other systems. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.