Enhanced Pseudonym Changing in VANETs: How Privacy is Impacted Using factitious Beacons

Abstract

Pseudonym changing is the main challenge in the development and commercialization of the Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) as the latter requires the participation of all vehicles joining the network to share sensitive information, which may lead to a leak of their privacy. Currently, several researches are focusing on mix-zone based pseudonym changing schemes, but the performance worsens when the vehicle density is low since the adversary can analyse the beacons from vehicles and employ a tracking algorithm accordingly. We note that Road Side Units (RSUs) can be adapted to generate factitious beacons pretending to be real vehicles so that the vehicle density is artificially increased. We built a traffic simulator and a beacon- based malicious adversary to assess how the performance of privacy protection is influenced by the generation of factitious beacons for low vehicle density situations. In the assessment, we compared the factitious beacon scheme with a traditional mix-zone scheme, and we measured the factors influencing the effectiveness of the factitious beacons.