Security Challenges of Location Privacy in VANETs and State-of-the-Art Solutions: A Survey

Abstract

A Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) comprises a group of moving or stationary vehicles connected by a wireless network. VANETs play a vital role in providing safety and comfort to drivers in vehicular environments. They provide smart traffic control and real-time information, event allocation. VANETs have received attention in support of safe driving, intelligent navigation, emergency and entertainment applications in vehicles. Nevertheless, these increasingly linked vehicles pose a range of new safety and security risks to both the host and its associated properties and may even have fatal consequences. Violations of national privacy and vehicle identities are a major obstacle to introducing forced contact protocols in vehicles. Location privacy refers to the privacy of the vehicle (driver) and the location of the vehicle. Whenever a vehicle sends a message, no one but authorized entities should know their real identity and location of the vehicle. All the messages sent by the vehicle must be authenticated before processing, hence location privacy is an important design aspect to be considered in VANETs operations. The novelty of this paper is that it specifically reviews location privacy in VANETs in terms of operational and safety concerns. Furthermore, it presents a critical analysis of various attacks, identity thefts, manipulation and other techniques in vogue for location privacy protection available in state-of-the-art solutions for VANETs. The efforts in this paper will help researchers to develop a great breadth of understanding pertaining to location privacy issues and various security threats encountered by VANETs and present the critical analysis of the available state-of-the- art solutions to maintain location privacy in VANETs.

An Efficient Dynamic Solution for the Detection and Prevention of Black Hole Attack in VANETs

“…The packet delivery ratio (PDR) represents the ratio of the total number of packets received at a destination node to the total number of packets originated at the source node, as shown in Equation (17).…”

“…∑ Number of packets received ∑ Number of packets sent (17) Figure 11 shows the simulation results, indicating the PDR in terms of percentage on the y-axis and the number of nodes on the x-axis. It can be observed that as the number of nodes increased, the PDR decreased due to the presence of more malicious nodes and packet collision occurrences in the network.…”

“…The generic architecture of a VANET is shown in Figure 1. The high mobility of vehicles, high dynamic network topology, non-centralized control, large scale network, time-critical communications, and open access to both legitimate and illegitimate users are some of the distinguishing characteristics of VANETs [14][15][16][17]. In VANETs, data communication and routing are constantly vulnerable to many security attacks due to these characteristics and constraints.…”

A lightweight and secure online/offline cross-domain authentication scheme for VANET systems in Industrial IoT

“…The authentication of messages can reduce these threats because of users’ wrong behaviors, such as false information transmissions, re-transmission of previous messages, and changes in the messages sent. Since users’ data should be kept secret, including driver names, speeds, positions, and relationships with other users, authentication should be performed anonymously ( Khan et al, 2021 ). There is a contradiction between anonymity and dedication.…”

Trajectory Privacy Preserving for Continuous LBSs in VANET

“…Once the LBSP is untrustworthy or attacked by malicious adversaries, vehicles' identities and locations will be disclosed. By analyzing frequently visited locations, private information of vehicle drivers, such as personal preferences, work locations, home addresses, and health conditions, can be revealed [2,3]. To deal with these threats, location privacy preserving for LBSs has long been considered as an important research topic in VANETs.…”