Defense against misbehavior in anonymous vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) can offer various services and benefits to VANET users and thus deserves deployment effort. Misusing such network could cause destructive consequences. It is therefore necessary to discourage misbehavior and defend VANET systems against it, in order to ensure correct and smooth operations of the network. In this paper, we review the techniques for handling misbehavior in VANETs, particularly where anonymous communications are desired to conserve user privacy since it adds more complexity to the defense against misbehavior. A new scheme is proposed to punish misbehaving users and can be employed in both inter-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure anonymous communications. Our scheme leverages some threshold authentication technique that dynamically revokes a user’s credential, while providing the flexibility of whether to reveal the user’s identity and tolerating unintentional misbehavior such as hardware malfunctioning.