Improved Conditional Privacy Protection in Vehicle Ad-hoc Networks

Vehicle ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are susceptible to numerous attacks since all nodes of the network contain information like driver details, vehicle type, license plate, speed, location, and moving route. Since human lives are at stake, privacy is one of the major challenges. The abovementioned information is required by legal authorities for traffic management and prevention of accidents/crimes. Hence, the requirement of a conditional privacy scheme to achieve both obscurity as well as traceability has become a growing field of research. This paper presents an improved conditional privacy protection scheme in VANETs where an identity-based cryptosystem uses pseudonyms to assure user obscurity; at the same time, a backdoor access is provided for legal authorities to track defiant and untrustworthy users.