Date of Award

1-1-2011

Document Type

Campus Access Thesis

Department

Computer Science and Engineering

First Advisor

Csilla Farkas

Abstract

In my thesis I have studied the privacy and accountability issues present in VANET communications. The main challenge of my research is how to provide both vehicle privacy and accountability in single framework without existence of a single trusted entity. While several approaches have been proposed to support vehicle anonymity, these approaches fail to provide the accountability, that is, the capability to identify misbehaving vehicle. I propose a Privacy System, in which person's real identity will be kept hidden form VANET group and general public with help of pseudonames. My approach guarantees that vehicle owner's identity can be traced back to the real person in case of a misbehaving vehicle. Misbehavior may range from the improper behavior in the network to serious circumstances such as accidents, traffic rules violation, etc. I am also proposing a Reputation Management System between vehicle nodes. The reputation system provides incentives to the vehicles to keep communications safe and to identify misbehaving vehicles. This Reputation Management System will allow vehicle owners to generate new pseudonames if they behave according to the VANET requirements. The more number of pseudonames a vehicle has, the greater level of privacy is achieved by keeping vehicle owner's real identity hidden and preventing linkage between the pseudonames. My model also provides accountability. If the vehicle misbehaves than its reputation will go down and will be given warnings and strict actions would be taken if required.

Rights

© 2011, Ankur Jain

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