VProof: Lightweight Privacy-Preserving Vehicle Location Proofs

Abstract—Transportation systems relying on vehicles to collect data for services such as road condition monitoring are vulnerable to malicious vehicles injecting large amounts of fake data. A particularly serious type of attack is one in which attackers report fake information about numerous places without actually having been there. In this paper, we present VProof, which is a vehicle location proof scheme that enables a vehicle to prove that its lo-cation claims match its historical locations. With VProof, vehicles construct their location proofs by simply extracting relevant con-tents from the packets received from roadside units. Our scheme is lightweight, since there is no communication required for a prover to obtain a location proof. Our scheme also well preserves users’ privacy, as we do not put any information that can be related to a user’s ID in a location proof. We have implemented a prototype VProof system and evaluated it with extensive real-world experi-ments. Our evaluation results show that VProof is able to reliably prove vehicle’s locations without leaking any user privacy. Index Terms — Location proof, privacy, security, vehicular net-works