Efficient and Secure Location-Based Services Scheme in VANET

Abstract

In VANET, the privacy of the query becomes a serious concern for location-based services (LBS). An LBS scheme must, also, not breach the location privacy of the user vehicle. In order to protect query privacy of the vehicle user, the existing state-of-the-art schemes either reduce the accuracy of LBS or insert a trusted third party (TTP) between the vehicle user and the location server hosting the LBS scheme. Cryptographic constructs such as public-key encryption, Oblivious Transfer (OT), Private Information Retrieval (PIR), and homomorphic encryption are used to remove the TTP or increase the accuracy of the previous schemes. The problem with these existing schemes is that some of them are either inefficient or insecure. In order to address the security and privacy issues, we propose an efficient privacy-preserving mechanism for protecting the query privacy of the user, information content of the location server, and location privacy-preserving of the vehicle in the LBS scheme for VANET. In this scheme, the vehicle requests for services from the location server without revealing the query content to the location server. The location server sends all Point of Interests (POIs) to the vehicle, but the vehicle can only obtain the requested query content. The query privacy of the user and content privacy of the location server is preserved in the exchange. The proposed variant of the OT extension protocol is computationally and communicationally efficient and uses a lattice-based ring-Learning With Errors (ring-LWE) scheme as a Base-OT.