Vehicular Digital Forensics (VDF) is essential to enable liability cognizance of accidents and fight against crimes. Ensuring the authority to timely gather, analyze, and trace data promotes vehicular investigations. However, adversaries crave the identity of the data provider/user, damage the evidence, violate evidence jurisdiction, and leak evidence. Therefore, protecting privacy and evidence accountability while guaranteeing access control and traceability in VDF is no easy task. To address the above-mentioned issues, we propose Eunomia: an anonymous and secure VDF scheme based on blockchain. It preserves privacy with decentralized anonymous credentials without trusted third parties. Vehicular data and evidence are uploaded by data providers to the blockchain and stored in distributed data storage. Each investigation is modeled as a finite state machine with state transitions being executed by smart contracts. Eunomia achieves fine-grained evidence access control via ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption and Bulletproofs. A user must hold specific attributes and a temporary-and unexpired token/warrant to retrieve data from the blockchain. Finally, a secret key is embedded into data to trace the traitor if any evidence breach happens. We use a formal analysis to demonstrate the strong privacy and security properties of Eunomia. Moreover, we build a prototype in a WiFi-based Ethereum test network to evaluate its performance.@en

Current connected and autonomous vehicles will contribute to various and green vehicular services. However, sharing personal data with untrustworthy Navigation Service Providers (NSPs) raises serious location concerns. To address this issue, many Location Privacy-Preserving Mechanisms (LPPMs) have been proposed. In addition, several quantification methods have been designed to help understand location privacy and illustrate how location privacy is leaked. However, their assessment is insufficient due to the incomplete assumptions about the adversary’s model. In particular, users tend to request the same navigation routes from home to workplace and acquire traffic information along the route. An adversary can collect the coordinates of adjacent locations and infer the two true locations. In this paper, we provide a formal framework for the analysis of LPPMs in navigation services. Our framework captures extra information that is available to an adversary performing localization attacks. By formalizing the adversary’s performance, we also propose and justify two new metrics to quantify location privacy in navigation services, namely accuracy and visibility. We assess the efficacy of two popular LPPMs for location privacy, i.e., differential privacy and k-anonymity. Experimental results demonstrate that the adversary can recover users’ locations with a high probability.@en

Ride-Hailing Service (RHS) has motivated the rise of innovative transportation services. It enables riders to hail a cab or private vehicle at the roadside by sending a ride request to the Ride-Hailing Service Provider (RHSP). Such a request collects rider’s real-time locations, which incur serious privacy concerns for riders. While there are many location privacy-preserving mechanisms in the literature, few of them consider mobility patterns or location semantics in RHS. In this work, we propose a pick-up location recommendation scheme with location indistinguishability and semantic indistinguishability for RHS. Specifically, we give formal definitions of location indistinguishability and semantic indistinguishability. We model the rider mobility as a time-dependent first-order Markov chain and generates a rider’s mobility profile. Next, it calculates the geographic similarity between riders by using the Mallows distance and classifies them into different geographic groups. To comprehend the semantics of a location, it extracts such information through user-generated content from two popular social networks and obtains the semantic representations of locations. Cosine similarity and unified hypergraph are used to compute the semantic similarities between locations. Finally, it outputs a set of recommended pick-up locations. To evaluate the performance, we build our mobility model over the real-world dataset GeoLife, analyze the computational costs of a rider, show the utility, and implement it on an Android smartphone. The experimental results show that it costs less than 0.12 ms to recommend 10 pick-up locations within 500 m of walking distance.@en

Location-based services (LBSs) are widely deployed in commercial services. These services always depend on a service provider, e.g., a cloud server, to store the enormous amounts of geospatial data and to process various queries. For example, a Yelp user can retrieve a list of recommended cafés by submitting her/his current location to the service provider. While LBSs offer tremendous benefits, it is vital to safeguard users’ privacy against untrusted service providers. However, no prior secure k nearest neighbor query processing schemes satisfy the three security requirements of one-time, oblivious, and unlinkable. In particular, we are concerned with the problem of item exclusion: how to match one data query with each item on the cloud no more than once in an oblivious and unlinkable manner. In this paper, we propose the first secure k nearest neighbor query processing scheme, Obaq, that satisfies the above requirements. Obaq first introduces an item identifier into an existing secure k nearest neighbor query processing scheme. Each data owner inserts an item identifier and her/his location information into a secure index, and each data user transfers the identifier of a previously received data item and location information into a specific range. Then, Obaq excludes corresponding items via privacy-preserving range querying. We define strong index privacy and strong token privacy and formally prove the security of Obaq in the random oracle model. We further evaluate the performance of Obaq using a prototype and a real-world dataset. The experimental results show that Obaq is highly efficient and practical in terms of computational cost, communication overhead, and response delay.@en