Practical Privacy for Value-Added Applications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Advances in mobile networking and information processing technologies have triggered vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) for traffic safety and value-added applications. Most efforts have been made to address the security concerns while little work has been done to investigate security and privacy for value-added applications in VANETs. To fill this gap, we propose a value-added application, specifically, a security and privacy preserving location-based service (LBS) scheme for VANETs. For each LBS transaction, the scheme provides authentication, integrity and non-repudiation for both the service provider and the user. A user can obtain the service in an anonymous way and hence user privacy is well protected. However, a tracing procedure can be invoked to find malicious users, thereby efficiently preventing users from abusing the anonymity provided by the system.