SECURE CONDITIONAL PRIVACY SCHEME FOR POSITION BASED ROUTING IN VEHICULAR AD HOC NETWORKS

Abstract

A Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a decentralized ad-hoc network, formed of vehicles acting as highly mobile nodes. Due to its applicability in traffic safety applications, is has caught the attention of researchers. VANETs are expected to support not only safety applications but diverse infrastructure-based commercial services as well. The requirement of a communication system that ensures vehicle to vehicle communication, efficient transmission of vehicle generated announcements and proper routing in a highly dynamic environment must be satisfied before service oriented VANETs can be successfully deployed. This poses many new research challenges, especially on the aspects of security and user's privacy. In this dissertation, the design requirements in the aspects of security and privacy preservation between communicating devices in VANETs are identified. A secure and privacy preserving scheme based on digital signature techniques is then proposed which not only guarantees the requirement of security and privacy but can also provide desired traceability of each vehicle in the case where the identity of the message sender has to be revealed by the authority. Extensive simulation is conducted to verify efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed scheme in various scenarios under different road systems. Finally the thesis is concluded by pointing out some open issues and possible direction of future research relating to privacy and security in VANETs.