Privacy in inter-vehicular networks: why simple pseudonym change is not enough

  • Authors:
  • Björn Wiedersheim;Zhendong Ma;Frank Kargl;Panos Papadimitratos

  • Affiliations:
  • Institute of Media Informatics, Ulm University, Germany;Institute of Media Informatics, Ulm University, Germany;University of Twente, The Netherlands;Laboratory for Computer Communications and Applications, EPFL, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • WONS'10 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Wireless on-demand network systems and services
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Inter-vehicle communication (IVC) systems disclose rich location information about vehicles. State-of-the-art security architectures are aware of the problem and provide privacy enhancing mechanisms, notably pseudonymous authentication. However, the granularity and the amount of location information IVC protocols divulge, enable an adversary that eavesdrops all traffic throughout an area, to reconstruct long traces of the whereabouts of the majority of vehicles within the same area. Our analysis in this paper confirms the existence of this kind of threat. As a result, it is questionable if strong location privacy is achievable in IVC systems against a powerful adversary.