Conditional Privacy through Ring Signature in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks

Ring signature allows a signer to disclose reliable information by enabling source authentication while allowing him to be indistinguishable among the possible signers. The scheme is setup free and a vehicle can create a signer group on the fly without taking the consent of the other possible signers to disseminate messages. However, absolute anonymity can be misused. In this paper, a non repudiation mechanism has been proposed in ring signature scheme to make a vehicle's privacy conditional. A vehicle can obtain the public keys of the vehicles around it to create a signature. This signature can be used to prove the accuracy of a message without revealing the signer's identity. The signer remains hidden in the crowd of his neighboring vehicles and their public keys giving it both location and identity privacy. Simulation results the time taken by the scheme to create signed message and transfer it over the shared wireless channel is in the order of milliseconds for different traffic conditions on the road. This proves the efficacy of the scheme and makes it attractive for VANETs.

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