Mechanism for Privacy Preservation in VANETs

Problem Description

A link between the personal interests of a user with physical locations of a vehicle can breach the location privacy and reveal the identity. In this mobile broadcast environment, a vehicle’s privacy can be sustained through unobservability (ClauB & Schiffner, 2006). A vehicle would be unobservable if its communication can be distinguished from others in the group. The effective crowd that hides the vehicle is a function of the capabilities of the attacker, the actual size of the crowd and the unlinkability of the messages emanating from the crowd (Gerlach & Guttler, 2007). The size of the crowd is the number of vehicles in the anonymity zone Z. The position of a vehicle cannot be predicted accurately from its transmission (Sampigethaya et al., 2007). To avoid breach of privacy, a vehicle using pseudonyms and continuously updates it. The problem is that even a large pseudonym pool would be depleted quickly if every transmission uses a separate pseudonym. This requires a strategy for update for conservation of this pseudonym pool.