The demand for safe and secure journeys over roads and highways has been growing at a tremendous pace over recent decades. At the same time, the smart city paradigm has emerged to improve citizens’ quality of life by developing the smart mobility concept. Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) are widely recognized to be instrumental in realizing such concept, by enabling appealing safety and infotainment services. Such networks come with their own set of challenges, which range from managing high node mobility to securing data and user privacy. The Software Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm has been identified as a suitable solution for dealing with the dynamic network environment, the increased number of connected devices, and the heterogeneity of applications. While some preliminary investigations have been already conducted to check the applicability of the SDN paradigm to VANETs, and its presumed benefits for managing resources and mobility, it is still unclear what impact SDN will have on security and privacy. Security is a relevant issue in VANETs, because of the impact that threats can have on drivers’ behavior and quality of life. This paper opens a discussion on the security threats that future SDN-enabled VANETs will have to face, and investigates how SDN could be beneficial in building new countermeasures. The analysis is conducted in real use cases (smart parking, smart grid of electric vehicles, platooning, and emergency services), which are expected to be among the vehicular applications that will most benefit from introducing an SDN architecture.

While the adoption of connected vehicles is growing, security and privacy concerns are still the key barriers raised by society. These concerns mandate automakers and standardization groups to propose convenient solutions for privacy preservation. One of the main proposed solutions is the use of Pseudonym-Changing Strategies (PCSs). However, ETSI has recently published a technical report which highlights the absence of standardized and efficient PCSs [1]. This alarming situation mandates an innovative shift in the way that the privacy of end-users is protected during their journey. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is emerging as a key 5G enabler to manage the network in a dynamic manner. SDN-enabled wireless networks are opening up new programmable and highly-flexible privacy-aware solutions. We exploit this paradigm to propose an innovative software-defined location privacy architecture for vehicular networks. The proposed architecture is context-aware, programmable, extensible, and able to encompass all existing and future pseudonym-changing strategies. To demonstrate the merit of our architecture, we consider a case study that involves four pseudonym-changing strategies, which we deploy over our architecture and compare with their static implementations. We also detail how the SDN controller dynamically switches between the strategies according to the context.