A Group Leader Location Hiding Technique for VANETs

Introduction

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) provide a new way of wireless communication that enables the vehicles to communicate with each other based on the ad hoc network concept. Vehicles can easily interact and communicate with each other across the road without the need of intermediary networking devices. VANETs are intended to support various applications such as vehicle safety and traffic management applications, which may improve the efficiency, safety, and reliability of the transportation system. Vehicles in VANET can communicate with each other directly forming what is known as Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) communication (Al-Sultan, Al-Doori, Al-Bayatti, & Zedan, 2014), or can communicate with Road Side Units (RSUs) forming Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication (Grover, Gaur, Laxmi, & Tiwari, 2012). To allow communication between vehicles, each vehicle must be equipped with a wireless communication device known as On-Board Unit (OBU). Vehicles may exchange information such as road service information, collision warnings, and traffic congestions. The communication between vehicles is based on the Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC) system, which utilizes the IEEE 802.11p wireless communication standard (Kenney, 2011). Vehicles may be also equipped with crypto devices for protecting critical vehicle data securely in an encrypted way. The infrastructure and the ad hoc environments are connected together using the RSUs, which act as gateways that are widely deployed across the road to deliver packets to the infrastructure side and to make it routable to the Internet. Security and privacy in VANET are receiving major attention from researchers in the recent years (Hussain, Rezaeifar, Lee, & Oh, 2015; Landwehr et al., 2012; Mei, Jiang, Zhang, & Cui, 2014; Mejri, Ben-Othman, & Hamdi, 2014; Raw, Kumar, & Singh, 2013; Yan, Yang, Lin, & Rawat, 2012).

The nature of VANET communication and the way data is being shared between nodes could lead to unique vulnerabilities and several security threats. Therefore, it is important to apply the appropriate countermeasures in order to overcome the most common vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Security and privacy could affect the applicability of the VANET system. Variety types of security attacks and threats target the VANET environment, which compromises the main security aspects such as confidentiality, integrity, and availability. For example, a man in the middle attack compromises the confidentiality of the communicating entities by illegitimately eavesdropping packets exchanged between two legitimate vehicle nodes. Therefore, it is important to apply the appropriate countermeasures and techniques to overcome the most recent vulnerabilities (Mejri et al., 2014). Accompanied by the advances and huge evolution in mobile communication technologies and the growing demand for location-based applications in our life, there are several security threats that need to be controlled. Many applications in VANET rely on location information of vehicle nodes, whether these applications are for safety or non-safety purposes (Al-Qassas, 2016). These applications depend on the use of beacon packets and warning probes, which may contain critical information about the vehicles and their users. These information may include location, speed, direction and destination. Thus, the privacy of users including their location could be threatened in many different ways.