Attacker Placement for Detecting Vulnerabilities of Pseudonym Change Strategies in VANET

Abstract

The use of pseudonyms has been proposed in VANETs to enhance location privacy of users. In order to prevent tracking, the pseudonyms associated with a vehicle must be changed frequently. A pseudonym change strategy (PCS) determines the conditions under which pseudonyms should change. An effective PCS is critical for maintaining the privacy of vehicles. Many different PCS have been proposed in recent years. It is important to study the performance of these PCS against intelligent and realistic attacker(s), before actual deployment in vehicles. In this paper, we propose a novel technique for attacker placement and compare the performance of different PCS, using the proposed placement schemes as well as random placement. We also evaluate PCS under different attacker capabilities and traffic conditions. Results indicate that the intelligent attacker placement can have a significant impact on tracking success and can be used to highlight vulnerabilities of a PCS under different traffic conditions.