Lightweight and Privacy-preserving Location Proofs for Intelligent Transportation Systems

Transportation systems relying on vehicles to collect data for services such as road condition monitoring are vulnerable to malicious vehicles injecting large amounts of fake data. A particularly serious type of attack is that attackers report fake information about numerous places without actually presenting there. In this paper, we present VProof, a vehicle location proof scheme that enables a vehicle to prove its location claims match its historical locations. With VProof, vehicles construct their location proofs by simply extracting relevant contents from the packets received from roadside units. Our scheme is lightweight, since there is no communication required for a prover to obtain a location proof. Our scheme also well preserves users’ privacy, as we do not put any information that can be related to a user’s ID in a location proof. We have implemented a prototype VProof system and evaluated it with extensive real-world experiments. Our evaluation results show that VProof is able to reliably prove vehicle’s locations without leaking any user privacy.