Skip to main content

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Future Transp.

Sec. Connected Mobility and Automation

Volume 6 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/ffutr.2025.1519759

Comparative evaluation of pseudonym-based anonymisation techniques for Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs)

Provisionally accepted
Al Tariq Sheik Al Tariq Sheik 1*Jia Liu Jia Liu 2*Mehrdad Dianati Mehrdad Dianati 3*Carsten Maple Carsten Maple 1
  • 1 University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
  • 2 University of Surrey, Guildford, South East England, United Kingdom
  • 3 Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The technical requirements for securing safety-related applications in connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) include security (e.g., authentication, integrity, non-repudiation depending on the specific applications), privacy (e.g., anonymity and unlinkability) and computing efficiency of the solutions designed to address security and privacy aspects. Several cryptographic techniques have been considered in the literature to meet these technical requirements. A notable category of these techniques is often referred to as pseudonym schemes in the context of CAVs, which aim to address security and privacy simultaneously. This paper provides an overview of the state-of-the-art research on pseudonym techniques for CAVs, including a comparative evaluation of their performance in the context of two representative safety-related CAV applications: Cooperative positioning and intersection collision avoidance. This study aims to guide the effective adoption of such schemes for various applications in CAVs. In this paper, three main categories of pseudonym schemes are considered: public key schemes, identity-based signatures, and group signatures. We compare these schemes with respect to security and privacy requirements as identified for several CAV applications. We also implement several representative pseudonym schemes in each category to evaluate their processing efficiency for signing and verifying messages used in CAV applications to provide insight into their applicability for CAV applications.

    Keywords: pseudonym authentication, Pseudonym, connected automated vehicle (CAV), comparison, Evaluation, security, Privacy, signatures

    Received: 30 Oct 2024; Accepted: 29 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Sheik, Liu, Dianati and Maple. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence:
    Al Tariq Sheik, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom
    Jia Liu, University of Surrey, Guildford, GU2 7XH, South East England, United Kingdom
    Mehrdad Dianati, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast, BT7 INN, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

    Research integrity at Frontiers

    Man ultramarathon runner in the mountains he trains at sunset

    94% of researchers rate our articles as excellent or good

    Learn more about the work of our research integrity team to safeguard the quality of each article we publish.


    Find out more