Robust distributed privacy-preserving secure aggregation in vehicular communication

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), formed by computers embedded in vehicles and the traffic infrastructure, are expected to develop in the near future to improve traffic safety and efficiency. To this end, VANETs should be designed to be resistant against various abuses and attacks. In this paper, we first review the existing proposals to provide security, privacy, and data aggregation in vehicle-to-vehicle communication. We then address the fundamental issue of achieving these conflicting properties in a unified solution, having observed that separate efforts cannot fulfill the VANET design objectives. A set of new mechanisms are suggested for efficiently managing identities and securely compressing cryptographic witnesses, which are among the major obstacles to the deployment of strong security mechanisms in VANETs. Finally, we employ the standard threshold cryptographic technology to improve the basic protocol with robustness.