Restricted usage of anonymous credentials in vehicular ad hoc networks for misbehavior detection

Abstract

The automobile industry is entering a new era of digitalization with major impact on human mobility and transportation infrastructures. A result of such a convergence between the automobile and information technologies is vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), a type of mobile ad hoc networks that has recently enjoyed a lot of attention from the industry, the research community, lawmakers and privacy activists. In VANET, vehicles frequently broadcast various types of messages, including location data. This enables innovative applications and improvements in safety and driving experience. As messages broadcasted in the VANET are digitally signed and the receiver must be able to verify the sender's authentication and message integrity, there is a need to ensure broadcast authentication and protect driver's anonymity. However, communication in VANETs takes place with high frequency, and malicious vehicles can hide behind anonymity in order to duplicate packets and get advantage over other vehicles in the network. Indeed, state-of-the-art approaches to privacy-preserving messages broadcast in the VANET typically ensure that each vehicle has a number of pseudonymous certificates that are changed regularly in order to thwart an automated tracing of its activities. However, the possibility of uncontrolled simultaneous use of pseudonyms by misbehaving vehicles remain unaddressed. This paper proposes a set of anonymous credential system based protocols for VANET that enables the detection and limitation of pseudonym/credential overspending. The revocation of the misbehaving vehicle can be also achieved through the proposed solutions. With the prototypical implementation of the proposed protocols, it has been shown that the successful detection of fraud, i.e., pseudonyms overspending and the subsequent revocation of credentials are possible in VANET.