A Secure Architecture for Vehicular Cloud Computing

Abstract

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are a kind of networks that have two main types of communication V2V and V2I, which are vehicle–to–vehicle and vehicle–to–infrastructure respectively. VANET is one of the promising areas for the creation of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) to provide both safety and comfort for vehicle drivers. Recently, various technologies have evolved for VANETs to accommodate a wide range of driver needs. One of these technologies is known as Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC), which is designed to enable drivers to access a wide variety of Cloud services while driving. VCC is an emerging technology that vehicle drivers use for different applications, such as Location-Based Service (LBS) applications that require from the vehicles to send frequent location updates to LBS Providers for real-time services. Thus, the specific nature of VCC brings up the need to address necessary security and privacy issues for VCC to be integrated into the social life. Moreover, VCC imposes some security and privacy challenges for drivers, such as: sender location privacy and identity anonymity. Also, some VCC attacks emerge while using Location-Based Services (LBSs) offered by semi-trusted LBS Providers, such as: location tracking and user Thesis Summary

identification of drivers that breach users’ privacy. At the time when this thesis was written, the applications both safety-related and convenience-related were either under development or in initial stages since VANET system and VCC as a whole are yet to be implemented. Therefore, this thesis is dedicated to provide a secure architecture for a user that mitigates the existing VCC attacks while using LBS applications located in a Cloud.