Coupling location privacy with safety in VANETs

Abstract

Purpose – This research work aims to develop a framework which should be able to couple the location privacy with safety so that the safety and privacy tradeoff could be minimized without sacrificing the reliability of the VANETs Methodology/Design – The scheme uses pseudonym technique and reduces the number of authentication and safety messages for achieving the location privacy. Light-weight cryptography is used for authentication of vehicles and generation of the pseudonym. Findings – The proposed scheme provides protection from the adver saries that performs tracking of vehicles. The scheme also avoids the com munication overhead and network congestion. In addition to that protection against various attacks such as Sybil, impersonation, bogus information, and linking attacks is achieved. Research limitations – Vehicle to vehicle message authentication is not addressed in the proposed framework. Practical implications – The framework can be implemented in various IoT fields other than VANETs such as wireless sensor networks (WSN) and Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Originality/value – The framework provides a unique design to preserve location privacy along with safety using Light-weight cryptography and zero knowledge proof concept. Also the communication overhead is minimized by achieving the authentication and safety via significantly reducing the number of messages shared on the network.