Security and Privacy in Vehicular Networks

Abstract

The vehicular networks are formed by connected vehicle. They were initially developed to ensure safe driving and to extend the internet to the road edge. They provide various types of services and applications to the road users rendering their trips more enjoyable and comfortable. However, the vehicle’s cyber-activity may expose it to new types of risks, such as blackmailing, data trading, and profiling. Even worst, it may impact the onboard user’s safety and cause road causalities. The risks come from the tracking and privacy violation through the interception of exchanged messaged needed in the participation in the network. The privacy and security are the major issues that need to be resolved for the vehicular networks to be realized in a real-world implementation. In this thesis, we aim to propose privacy-preserving solutions that protect the user’s identity and location on roads to prevent tracking from occurring. Our solutions were tested to evaluate their performance against a strong attacker model. The thesis facilitates the understanding of the vehicular networks and their used technologies as well as their various types. It highlights the importance of privacy and security issues and their direct impact on the safety of their users. It includes two anonymous authentication methods that preserve the identity privacy and a total of five schemes that preserve the location privacy in the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) and the cloud-enabled internet of vehicles (CE-IoV) respectively. Moreover, it provides the design of a new privacy-aware blockchain-based pseudonym management framework. The framework is secure, distributed and public. It ensures the revocation, non-repudiation, authenticity and integrity which are fundamental security requirements. The proposal was developed as a potential replacement for the vehicular public key infrastructure (VPKI).