A-VIP: Anonymous Verification and Inference of Positions in Vehicular Networks
Abstract
Knowledge of the location of vehicles and tracking of the routes they follow are a requirement for a number of applications, including e-tolling and liability attribution in case of accidents. However, public disclosure of the identity and position of drivers jeopardizes user privacy, and securing the tracking through asymmetric cryptography may have an exceedingly high computational cost. Additionally, there is currently no way an authority can verify the correctness of the position information provided by a potentially misbehaving car. In this paper, we address all of the issues above by introducing A-VIP, a lightweight framework for privacy preserving and tracking of vehicles. A-VIP leverages anonymous position beacons from vehicles, and the cooperation of nearby cars collecting and reporting the beacons they hear. Such information allows an authority to verify the locations announced by vehicles, or to infer the actual ones if needed. We assess the effectiveness of A-VIP through both realistic simulation and testbed implementation results, analyzing also its resilience to adversarial attacks.