Research on reliable, secure and privacy preserving transmission in the VANETs

The thesis combines the focus area and challenges of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), and studies the MAC layer performance optimization and pseudonym management, so as to achieve the reliable, secure and privacy preserving transmission in the VANET. The main contributions of the thesis can be summarized as follows. We propose a MAC layer attack resistant pseudonym (MARP) scheme to deal with a new MAC layer context-linking attack, guarantee the location privacy and fulfill the transmission requirements in the VANET. We present a three layer software defined architecture for the Internet of Vehicles. Facilitated by the architecture, a MAC layer aware pseudonym (MAP) scheme is proposed to coordinate both the channel accessing and pseudonym change for the vehicles by the local RSU cloud. Security analysis and simulation results show that the MAP scheme can substantially outperform the compared existing methods in terms of the pseudonym distribution efficiency, location privacy and the reliability of safety message transmission. Lastly, a fully uncoordinated approach to change pseudonyms is proposed for distributed networks, where each node uses a pseudonym until its expiration and then changes after a random delay with no interaction with other nodes in the network. We use both theoretical analysis and simulation results to prove that, the k-anonymity can be achieved at a negligible throughput loss in the case of large networks.