Trajectory as an Identity: Privacy-Preserving and Sybil-Resistant Authentication for Internet of Vehicles

Abstract

With the advancement of the 5G network, the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) is becoming more and more attractive for academic researchers and industrial. A main challenge of IoV is to guarantee the authenticity of messages and protect drivers’ privacy simultaneously. The majority of privacy-preserving authentication schemes for IoV adopt pseudonyms or group signatures to achieve a balance between security and privacy. However, defending the Sybil attacks in these schemes is challenging. In this work, we propose a novel privacy-preserving authentication scheme for announcement messages, which utilizes the trajectories of vehicles as their identities. When an authenticated message is verified, the verifier is convinced that the message is generated by a vehicle that has a unique masked trajectory. Meanwhile, the real trajectories of vehicles are kept private. In particular, our scheme achieves Sybil attack resistance without the limitation of trajectory length even when the attacker is allowed to use cloud services.