Title: Providing location privacy for online services in vehicular ad hoc networks

Authors: Hesiri Weerasinghe; Huirong Fu

Addresses: Department of Computer Systems Engineering, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

Abstract: Communications through road side units in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can be used to track the location of vehicles, which makes serious threat on users' privacy. In this paper, we address the problem of location tracking for online service access and the privacy enhancement in VANETs. Firstly, by considering the unique characteristics of VANETs, we propose an anonymous online service access (AOSA) protocol. Secondly, we analytically evaluate the anonymity and the unlinkability of the proposed protocol. Finally, a series of simulation studies are conducted to evaluate the performance of our protocol in the real VANET environments such as Manhattan and urban scenarios. According to analytical evaluation and simulations, our protocol provides higher level of anonymity and location privacy by providing larger anonymity set and smaller tracking probability for online service access applications. Simulation results further show that our protocol is feasible and produce better performance in real VANET environments by producing higher success ratio and smaller delay.

Keywords: vehicular ad hoc network; VANET; privacy; anonymity; pseudonyms; certificate authority.

DOI: 10.1504/IJFSE.2019.104737

International Journal of Forensic Software Engineering, 2019 Vol.1 No.1, pp.91 - 114

Received: 16 May 2019
Accepted: 31 Aug 2019
Published online: 29 Jan 2020 *