Drivers' anonymity in vehicle-to-vehicle communication networks

In Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication networks, vehicles will broadcast their safety-critical information to alert nearby vehicles of hazardous road conditions and possible collisions. It is necessary to provide secure wireless communications for V2V safety applications to prevent unauthorized entities from tampering with the broadcasted data. The existence of a Certificate Authority (CA) is essential to establish and provide trust and secure communication protocols among drivers in V2V communication networks. By using certificates during the broadcast of the safety-critical information, the disclosure of drivers' unique public keys from their certificates will allow unauthorized entities to trace drivers' movements and locations they visit. Revealing such information without consent from drivers is a violation of their privacy. Designing a secure communication protocol that preserves drivers' anonymity is a challenging task. The reason behind this challenge is the stringent requirements of low communication latencies and short message lengths in V2V safety applications. This dissertation work proposes two broadcast protocols for V2V safety applications that provide anonymity for drivers, message authentication and data integrity. The first solution is based on an asymmetric cryptographic algorithm while the second solution is based on symmetric cryptographic algorithms. In both solutions, recipients of a broadcasted message can validate its integrity without identifying the source. In case of a dispute and malicious activities, the identity of the vehicle which broadcasted the disputed message can be revealed only by the CA.