Verifiable privacy protection for vehicular communication systems

David Förster examines privacy protection for vehicular communication under the assumption of an attacker that is able to compromise back-end systems – motivated by the large number of recent security incidents and revelations about mass surveillance. The author aims for verifiable privacy protection enforced through cryptographic and technical means, which safeguards user data even if back-end systems are not fully trusted. Förster applies advanced cryptographic concepts, such as anonymous credentials, and introduces a novel decentralized secret sharing algorithm to fulfill complex and seemingly contradicting requirements in several vehicle-to-x application scenarios. Many of the concepts and results can also be applied to other flavors of internet of things systems.