VANET Security: Enabling Secure and Privacy Aware Identityless Beaconing Mechanism in Vehicular Networks

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. At the full deployment stage, 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. First, we outline the strategies using pseudonyms to provide privacy of user. After finding out deficiencies in pseudonym-based schemes, a pseudonymless strategy is proposed to preserve privacy in VANET. In this scheme, it is assumed that each car is equipped with a TRH (Tamper-Resistant Hardware) carrying out secure operations. Comparing to existing schemes, the proposed scheme assures the avoidance of profile generation. The former proposed schemes used mix zones and silent periods for increasing the anonymity while the proposed scheme in this work does not need such mix zones and silent periods. Additionally, identityless beaconing mechanism is implemented according to DSRC standard named VANETB protocol. The proposed scheme provides conditional anonymity where a beacon message can be revoked if there is any misbehave on the part of any vehicular node which may lead to vehicle revocation.