A Secure and Location Assurance Protocol for Location-Aware Services in VANETs

In this paper, we propose a secure and location assurance protocol in order to guarantee authentication and to avoid illegal location tracking of vehicles in location-aware services over VANETs. In addition, the proposed protocol enables a message verifier to have confidence that the location-aware information was responded from the vehicles actually passed through the target location area without violating location privacy for responders. To achieve our security objectives, we use pseudonyms for privacy-preserving authentication and deploy a hierarchical identity-based signature scheme to achieve our security objectives. We also evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol.