Holistic approach for coupling privacy with safety in VANETs

The drastic increase in road accidents has motivated transport community to safeguard passengers from serious injuries and casualties. Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) introduced smart vehicles that can wirelessly communicate with each other to contribute to the enhancement of road safety by forming a network on ad-hoc basis called Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs). In VANETs, vehicles periodically broadcast beacon messages to get better and timely awareness of road's condition. However, these unencrypted beacon messages bring a serious concern on the people's privacy if an adversary overhears them. The research community has proposed to use a pseudonym instead of real identity; however, vehicle's location traces can still be built with ease. Numerous location privacy protection techniques have been proposed; however, they work on turning the vehicle's radio transmitter off which consequently can affect safety applications. Protecting the drivers' location at the risk of sacrificing their safety makes the key purpose of VANETs questionable. In this paper, we aim to develop a holistic safety-aware location preserving scheme called Coupling Privacy with Safety (CPS) which ensures to provide drivers' privacy along with their safety. CPS contributes to providing protection against syntactic linking attack, semantic linking attack, misleading attack/false alarm, Sybil attack and impersonation attack. It also avoids congestion and communication overhead. It also maintains QoS along with location protection and provides revocation facility. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.