VPPCS: VANET-Based Privacy-Preserving Communication Scheme

Over the past years, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been commonly used in intelligent traffic systems. VANET's design encompasses critical features that include autonomy, distributed networking, and rapidly changing topology. The characteristics of VANET and its implementations for road safety have attracted considerable industry and academia interest, particularly in research involving transport systems enhancement that could potentially save lives. Message broadcasting in an open access system, such as VANET, is the main and utmost challenging problem with regard to security and privacy in VANETs. Various studies on VANET security and privacy have been proposed. Nevertheless, none has considered overall privacy requirements such as unobservability. In order to address these shortcomings, we propose a VANET based privacy-preserving communication scheme (VPPCS), which meets the requirements for content and contextual privacy. It leverages elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) and an identity-based encryption scheme. We have carried out a detailed security analysis (burrows-abadi-needham (BAN) logic, random oracle model, security of proof, and security attributes) to validate and verify the proposed scheme. The analysis has shown that our scheme is secure and also shown to be effective in a performance evaluation. The proposed scheme does not only meet the previously mentioned security and privacy requirements, but also impervious to various types of attacks such as replay, impersonation, modification, and man-in-the-middle attacks.