Adjusted Location Privacy Scheme for VANET Safety Applications

Abstract

The primary aim of Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANET) is to enhance traffic safety by enabling frequent broadcasting of location information between vehicles. In VANET safety applications, a vehicle requires to broadcast messages, which usually contain its location information, every (1-10 Hz) with other vehicles in its communication area (300m) to facilitate cooperative awareness. This would arise privacy issues because vehicles are vulnerable to tracking attacks via their locations. To prevent long-term linking, many privacy schemes have adopted a silent period in which a vehicle stops sharing its locations for a period. However, silent periods could have a negative impact on safety applications as an accident could have happened if a vehicle stop sharing its locations with other neighbours. Thus, in this paper, we first discuss three privacy schemes (RSP, SLOW and CAPS), which adopted silent periods but in different concepts. Then, we improve the privacy and safety level of CAPS. A privacy simulator PREXT is used to evaluate and compare the performance of schemes.