Towards privacy-preserving and secure opportunistic routings in VANETs

Opportunistic routing has been extensively studied and utilized in networks with high dynamics and large scales, e.g., city-wide vehicle networks. The extensive use of nodes´ local information, i.e., the routing metrics, in such routings can cause severe security and privacy problems. Existing solutions of anonymous routing can introduce undesired overhead and fail to provide the confidentiality of the routing metric. In this paper, we propose an advanced framework for opportunistic routings, providing following properties: the confidentiality of nodes´ routing metric, anonymous authentication and an efficient key agreement for pair-wise secret communication. A comprehensive evaluation, including security analysis, efficiency analysis and simulation evaluation, is presented to show the security and feasibility of the proposed framework.