On the effectiveness of changing pseudonyms to provide location privacy in VANETS

  • Authors:

  • Levente Buttyán;Tamás Holczer;István Vajda

  • Affiliations:

  • Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, Budapest University of Technology and Economics;Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, Budapest University of Technology and Economics;Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, Budapest University of Technology and Economics

  • Venue:
  • ESAS'07 Proceedings of the 4th European conference on Security and privacy in ad-hoc and sensor networks
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The promise of vehicular communications is to make road traffic safer and more efficient. However, besides the expected benefits, vehicular communications also introduce some privacy risk by making it easier to track the physical location of vehicles. One approach to solve this problem is that the vehicles use pseudonyms that they change with some frequency. In this paper, we study the effectiveness of this approach. We define a model based on the concept of the mix zone, characterize the tracking strategy of the adversary in this model, and introduce a metric to quantify the level of privacy enjoyed by the vehicles. We also report on the results of an extensive simulation where we used our model to determine the level of privacy achieved in realistic scenarios. In particular, in our simulation, we used a rather complex road map, generated traffic with realistic parameters, and varied the strength of the adversary by varying the number of her monitoring points. Our simulation results provide detailed information about the relationship between the strength of the adversary and the level of privacy achieved by changing pseudonyms.