Security on VANETs: Privacy, misbehaving nodes, false information and secure data aggregation

This article is a position paper on the current security issues in Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs). VANETs face many interesting research challenges in multiple areas, from privacy and anonymity to the detection and eviction of misbehaving nodes and many others in between. Multiple solutions have been proposed to address those issues. This paper surveys the most relevant while discussing its benefits and drawbacks. The paper explores the newest trends in privacy, anonymity, misbehaving nodes, the dissemination of false information and secure data aggregation, giving a perspective on how we foresee the future of this research area. First, the paper discusses the use of Public Key infrastructure (PKI) (and certificates revocation), location privacy, anonymity and group signatures for VANETs. Then, it compares several proposals to identify and evict misbehaving and faulty nodes. Finally, the paper explores the differences between syntactic and semantic aggregation techniques, cluster and non-cluster based with fixed and dynamic based areas, while presenting secure as well as probabilistic aggregation schemes. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.