Location Privacy using Anonymous Beacon in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Vehicular Ad hoc Network (VANET) plays a significant role in safety communication and commercial applications. Applications necessitate to track the location of vehicles, have a strong impact on location privacy and security. Ensuring the correctness of location information is essential without it being disclosed to other vehicles. Conventionally, a privacy preservation mechanism disseminates anonymous beacons for providing location based services to the vehicles and it is verified by the Location Server (LS). In VANET, it is crucial to develop a technique that provides security and privacy with minimum overhead. This study proposes a lightweight mechanism called as Preservation of Location Privacy through Anonymous Beacon (PLPAB) that provides location-based services to the users in a secured manner. Initially at the time of registration, a vehicle receives a triplet from LS. The triplet has a short term symmetric key for beacon encryption and decryption and it generates two random integers to evaluate mysterious time-dependent value shared between LS and vehicle. PLPAB includes two mechanisms such as anonymous beacon generation and location verification. In beacon generation, the vehicles broadcast an anonymous beacon at a specific interval for providing the secure location information. Instead of generating the beacon at all the time, it enables a vehicle to generate a beacon adapting to its mobility. Thus, it reduces unnecessary beacon generation, resulting in less overhead. In location verification, LS verifies the claimed location in the beacon by determining the inference of location using signal strength and speed of the beacon originator. The simulation results show that the PLPAB system achieves and preserves a higher level of location privacy on vehicles and is more resilient to attacks when compared to the existing A-VIP scheme.