Conditional Anonymity enabled Blockchain-based Ad Dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network

Advertisement sharing in vehicular network through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication is a fascinating in-vehicle service for advertisers and the users due to multiple reasons. It enable advertisers to promote their product or services in the region of their interest. Also the users get to receive more relevant ads. Usually, users tend to contribute in dissemination of ads if their privacy is preserved and if some incentive is provided. Recent researches have focused on enabling both of the parameters for the users by developing fair incentive mechanism which preserves privacy by using Zero-Knowledge Proof of Knowledge (ZKPoK) (Ming et al., 2019). However, the anonymity provided by ZKPoK can introduce internal attacker scenarios in the network due to which authenticated users can disseminate fake ads in the network without payment. As the existing scheme uses certificate-less cryptography, due to which malicious users cannot be removed from the network. In order to resolve these challenges, we employed conditional anonymity and introduced Monitoring Authority (MA) in the system. In our proposed scheme, the pseudonyms are assigned to the vehicles while their real identities are stored in Certification Authority (CA) in encrypted form. The pseudonyms are updated after a pre-defined time threshold to prevent behavioural privacy leakage. We performed security and performance analysis to show the efficiency of our proposed system.