A trust-privacy framework in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET)

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) allows vehicles to communicate on the road and is becoming a potential solution to improve the traffic safety. Both trust management and privacy protection play critical roles in VANET but there needs to be a trade-off between them. Existing works only focus on each issue separately or resolve both issues with a lack-of-security proposal. In this paper, we propose a secured framework for vehicles to manage both trust and privacy flexibly. We suggest that vehicles use pseudonyms for privacy and a linkability protocol to recognize other vehicles' identities despite them changing pseudonyms. The identity recognition facilitates nodes to utilize and update entity trust, which in turn helps vehicles to make more informative evaluation of received data. We design the secured linkability protocol using pseudonym-based encryption and Bloom filter Private Set intersection technique and a context-aware trust management scheme working compatibly with the linkability protocol. Simulation results demonstrate that our scheme helps nodes to protect their privacy and make accurate decision towards the data simultaneously.