Privacy preserving authentication in VANET for location based services

This paper deals with providing location based services to emergency vehicles and to the ordinary vehicles in a secure manner that needs services in a Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork (VANET). In VANET the vehicles are equipped with the On Board Unit (OBU) in which the developed application obtains the current location of the vehicle and makes updates in the location server and to the Road Side Unit (RSU). The location server is the centralized server that collects all the necessary information like position and the Id of the vehicles that are moving. The emergency vehicle obtains the location of the doctors´ vehicle from the location server or from the RSU. Then, the communication phase is established between the vehicles which are based on the Vehicle to Vehicle communication (V2V) model where the vehicles behave as nodes. Thus, by identifying the location information about the vehicle, the privacy of the vehicle users may be revealed. To avoid the issues involved in the privacy of vehicles users, the authentication for the vehicle users has been introduced. The successful authentication preserves the privacy of the vehicle user and establishes the secure communication between the vehicles. The efficiency of the communication is increased by introducing the Trusted Authority (TA). The trusted authority module performs the segregation of sensitive and insensitive messages and only the sensitive messages are encrypted through the pairing technique in the communication phase. Thus, Trusted Authority increases the performance of communication in a secure way between vehicles in emergency situation. The proposed system increases the performance by 19% for 100 characters when compared to existing system.