Abstract
The emerging Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks (VANETs) can improve safety, efficiency and convenience in transportation. In spite of the expected benefits, VANETs also introduce some location privacy risk by periodically broadcasting vehicular information. Pseudonym change is commonly accepted as one approach to protect location privacy in VANETs, but the effectiveness of most pseudonym change schemes has never been investigated theoretically. In this paper, focusing on the Random Pseudonym Change (RPC) scheme, we propose an analytical model to quantify its level of location privacy by calculating the size of anonymity set of a vehicle. With this model, we can analyze the probability of a vehicle changing pseudonym simultaneously with its neighbor, which can be then used to calculate the size of anonymity set of the vehicle. Further, we investigate the influence of the pseudonym lifetime distribution on the level of location privacy. Research results, which are validated via extensive simulations, show that for the RPC scheme, the uniform pseudonym lifetime distribution can provide better location privacy protection than the reciprocal pseudonym lifetime distribution. In addition, we also discuss the conditional probability of a vehicle changing pseudonym simultaneously with its neighbor given the age of pseudonym used by the neighbor at the time when the vehicle last changed pseudonym, and point out that utilizing the age of pseudonym can improve the level of location privacy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Beresford, A., Stajano, F.: Location privacy in pervasive computing. IEEE Pervasive Comput. 2(1), 46–55 (2003)
Buttyán, L., Holczer, T., Vajda, I.: On the effectiveness of changing pseudonyms to provide location privacy in vanets. In: Proceedings of the 4th European Workshop on Security and Privacy in Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks (ESAS 2007), Cambridge, UK, pp. 129–141 (2007)
Freudiger, J., Manshaei, M., Boudec, J.Y.L., Hubaux, J.P.: On the age of pseudonyms in mobile ad hoc networks. In: Proceedings of the 29th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications (IEEE INFOCOM 2010), San Diego, California, USA, pp. 1–9 (2010)
Freudiger, J., Raya, M., Feleghhazi, M.: Mix-zones for location privacy in vehicular networks. In: Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Wireless Networking for Intelligent Transportation Systems (WiN-ITS 2007), pp. 1–7. Vancouver, British, Columbia (2007)
Gerlach, M., Guttler, F.: Privacy in vanets using changing pseudonyms—ideal and real. In: Proceedings of IEEE 65th Vehicular Technology Conference (VTC2007), Dublin, Ireland, pp. 2521–2525 (2007)
Hartenstein, H., Laberteaux, K.: A tutorial survey on vehicular ad hoc networks. IEEE Commun. Mag. 46(6), 164–171 (2008)
Huang, L., Matsuura, K., Yamane, H., Sezaki, K.: Enhancing wireless location privacy using silent period. In: Proceedings of 2005 IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC), New Orleans, LA, USA, vol. 2, pp. 1187–1192 (2005)
Li, M., Sampigethaya, K., Huang, L., Poovendran, R.: Swing & swap: user-centric approaches towards maximizing location privacy. In: Proceedings of the 5th ACM Workshop on Privacy in Electronic Society (WPES ’06). Alexandria, Virginia, USA, pp. 19–28 (2006)
Liao, J., Li, J.: Effectively changing pseudonyms for privacy protection in vanets. In: Proceedings of 2009 10th International Symposium on Pervasive Systems, Algorithms, and Networks (ISPAN), Kaohsiung, Taiwan, pp. 648–652 (2009)
Lu, R., Li, X., Luan, T.H., Liang, X., Shen, X.: Pseudonym changing at social spots: an effective strategy for location privacy in vanets. IEEE Trans. Veh. Technol. 61(1), 86–96 (2012)
Ma, Z., Kargl, F., Weber, M.: A location privacy metric for v2x communication systems. In: Proc. SARNOFF ’09, Princeton, NJ, pp. 1–6 (2009)
Papadimitratos, P., et al.: Secure vehicular communication systems: design and architecture. IEEE Commun. Mag. 46(11), 100–109 (2008)
Raya, M., Hubaux, J.P.: The security of vehicular ad hoc networks. In: Proceedings of the 3rd ACM Workshop on Security of Ad hoc and Sensor Networks (SASN ’05), Alexandria, VA, USA, pp. 11–21 (2005)
Ross, S.M.: Introduction to Probability Models, 9th edn. Elsevier/Academic Press, Amsterdam (2007)
Sampigethaya, K., Li, M., Huang, L., Poovendran, R.: Amoeba: robust location privacy scheme for vanet. IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun. 25(8), 1569–1589 (2007)
Schoch, E., Kargl, F., Leinmüller, T., Schlott, S., Papadimitratos, P.: Impact of pseudonym changes on geographic routing in vanets. In: Proceedings of the Third European Workshop on Security and Privacy in Ad-Hoc and Sensor Networks (ESAS 2006), Hamburg, Germany, pp. 43–57 (2006)
Song, J.H., Wong, V.W.S., Leung, V.C.M.: Wireless location privacy protection in vehicular ad-hoc networks. Mob. Netw. Appl. 15(1), 160–171 (2010)
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Science and Technology Development Fund, Macao SAR under grant No. 016/2010/A.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Pan, Y., Li, J., Feng, L. et al. An analytical model for random pseudonym change scheme in VANETs. Cluster Comput 17, 413–421 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-012-0242-7
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10586-012-0242-7