A-VIP: Anonymous verification and inference of positions in vehicular networks

Knowledge of the location of vehicles and tracking of the routes they follow are a requirement for a number of applications. However, public disclosure of the identity and position of drivers jeopardizes user privacy, and securing the tracking through asymmetric cryptography may have an exceedingly high computational cost. In this paper, we address all of the issues above by introducing A-VIP, a lightweight privacy-preserving framework for tracking of vehicles. A-VIP leverages anonymous position beacons from vehicles, and the cooperation of nearby cars collecting and reporting the beacons they hear. Such information allows an authority to verify the locations announced by vehicles, or to infer the actual ones if needed. We assess the effectiveness of A-VIP through testbed implementation results.