A Privacy-Preserving Location Assurance Protocol for Location-Aware Services in VANETs

A location-aware service on a vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is to provide services that distribute on-demand information for a certain geographic area of interest by taking advantage of vehicular communications. In this paper, we propose a secure and location assurance protocol in order to guarantee privacy preservation in vehicular communications and trustworthiness of location-aware services over VANETs. The proposed protocol enables a message verifier to have confidence that the location-aware information was responded from the vehicles passing through the target location area of interest without violating location privacy of the responders. To achieve our security objectives, we consider a pseudonym-based privacy-preserving authentication and a hierarchical identity-based cryptographic scheme. Furthermore, we demonstrate experimental results to confirm the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed protocol.