A Distributed Mix-Context-Based Method for Location Privacy in Road Networks

Preserving location privacy is increasingly an essential concern in Vehicular Adhoc Networks (VANETs). Vehicles broadcast beacon messages in an open form that contains information including vehicle identity, speed, location, and other headings. An adversary may track the various locations visited by a vehicle using sensitive information transmitted in beacons such as vehicle identity and location. By matching the vehicle identity used in beacon messages at various locations, an adversary learns the location history of a vehicle. This compromises the privacy of the vehicle driver. In existing research work, pseudonyms are used in place of the actual vehicle identity in the beacons. Pseudonyms should be changed regularly to safeguard the location privacy of vehicles. However, applying simple change in pseudonyms does not always provide location privacy. Existing schemes based on mix zones operate efficiently in higher traffic environments but fail to provide privacy in lower vehicle traffic densities. In this paper, we take the problem of location privacy in diverse vehicle traffic densities. We propose a new Crowd-based Mix Context (CMC) privacy scheme that provides location privacy as well as identity protection in various vehicle traffic densities. The pseudonym changing process utilizes context information of road such as speed, direction and the number of neighbors in transmission range for the anonymisation of vehicles, adaptively updating pseudonyms based on the number of a vehicle neighbors in the vicinity. We conduct formal modeling and specification of the proposed scheme using High-Level Petri Nets (HPLN). Simulation results validate the effectiveness of CMC in terms of location anonymisation, the probability of vehicle traceability, computation time (cost) and effect on vehicular applications.