VANET-based secure taxi service

Taxi service is an important type of point-to-point transportation in many cities. One of the major concerns is the safety of both passengers and taxi drivers. In this paper, based on the framework of VANET (Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork), we propose a novel secure taxi service scheme to tackle the problem. First, a driver needs to authenticate himself using a password before he can provide any service. Second, after picking up a passenger, the taxi's OBU (on-board unit) needs to continuously send its current location to the trusted server. This location is then double-verified with RSU (road-side unit) signatures. We also design a cooperative tracking mechanism to locate a taxi in case of emergency. In some occasions, taxi passengers as well as taxi drivers are concerned with their privacy (such as travelling route). We incorporate privacy-preserving measures into our scheme. The taxi's OBU uses pseudo identities instead of real identity for all ongoing transmissions so that a passenger's travelling route (or the driver's travelling route when he/she is not carrying any passengers) cannot be traced by a third party easily. We show by simulation that the total delay (from 1 to 9 s) introduced by all security measures is small while the total number of messages required to be transmitted in the network is reasonable. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.