Location Privacy Scheme for VANETs

In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs), a vehicle could be identified and tracked by eavesdropping its messages (e.g., beacons) by an adversary, since these messages contain personal information such as the location of the vehicle. This attack leads to threats on the user's location privacy. Frequent changing pseudonyms are accepted as a solution to protect the location privacy of users in VANETs. In this paper, we propose an efficient pseudonym changing strategy to provide location privacy in VANETs. In addition, we describe a novel tracking attack, that is, the cheating attack. To confront this attack, we develop a cheating detection mechanism. Finally, we show by simulations that the proposed scheme is effective.