Privacy Preservation in the Internet of Vehicles using Local Differential Privacy and IOTA Ledger

With the growth in Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) technology, many vehicular devices are communicating with each other and with the edge nodes, generating a massive amount of data. One of the biggest challenges is to preserve users’ privacy as the data hold personal and sensitive information, which upon leakage could have disastrous consequences. Privacy preservation has gained remarkable consideration by companies as a notable number of users have started being conscious about privacy protection of their data. Most privacy preserving solutions that have been developed in such a distributed scenario need a third party for data anonymization. In a system of public data sharing, one of the most popular and useful anonymization techniques is Local Differential Privacy (LDP). LDP allows users to anonymize their data locally and individually and does not need a third party for data anonymization, resulting in stronger privacy guarantees. In this work, firstly, considering the security and privacy threats posed by untrusted third parties, namely edge nodes or roadside units (RSUs), we provide a privacy preservation solution for VANETs using LDP, eliminating the need for a third party to anonymize sensitive vehicular data. Secondly, to provide a tier 2 privacy and security, we introduce a model that uses IOTA ledger on top of the LDP perturbation technique. Consequently, not only does our model achieve privacy, but tier 2 privacy preservation method based on IOTA ledger provides immutability, scalability, and quantum secrecy over a largely complex and distributed network of vehicles.