Secure and Privacy-Aware Incentives-Based Witness Service in Social Internet of Vehicles Clouds

This paper introduces the concept of a new service for social Internet of Vehicles (IoV)-based clouds called incentives-based vehicle witnesses as a service (IVWaaS), which employs vehicles moving on the road as the witnesses to designated events. Specifically, we focus on two key enablers, a new secure and privacy preserving service framework as well as a new incentive mechanism to promote the wide adoption of the aforementioned social service. In IVWaaS, when confronted any events, the vehicles in the vicinity with mounted cameras collaborate with other roadside cameras to take pictures of the site of interest around them, and send the pictures to the cloud infrastructure anonymously so that the privacy of the vehicles can be preserved. To stimulate active participation from the users, we also introduce a new privacy-aware incentives mechanism called privacy-aware proportionate receipt collection, in which the contributors are credited according to their contribution to the service and can claim their incentives in a privacy-aware fashion. Service providers can also use the stored pictures as “on-demand picture service.” Other law enforcement agencies can obtain the stored pictorial information and use it as forensics in the investigations.