TAPCS: Traffic-aware pseudonym changing strategy for VANETs

Abstract

Location privacy is one of the main challenges in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs), since weak protection may hinder the public acceptance of this technology. Frequently changing pseudonyms are commonly accepted as a solution to protect the location privacy in VANETs. However, a simple pseudonym change is not enough to provide the required protection. Although many pseudonym changing strategies have been proposed to enhance the location privacy protection provided by this approach, the development of an effective strategy is not yet achieved. In this paper, we propose a new pseudonym changing strategy called Traffic-Aware Pseudonym Changing Strategy (TAPCS). The aim of this strategy is to provide an effective location privacy protection against the different types of pseudonyms linking attacks that can be performed by a strong passive adversary model. TAPCS is a distributed pseudonym changing strategy and is one of the strategies that use the radio silence technique. Unlike the existing distributed pseudonym changing strategies that use this technique, TAPCS aims to provide a high level of location privacy protection without impacting the safety in the VANETs. The analytical evaluation and simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.