Location privacy in vehicular networks

Abstract

Location privacy is one of the main challenges in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET), which aim to protect vehicles from being tracked. Most of research work concern changing pseudonyms effectively to avoid linking messages through them. However, the sensitive information the vehicles send periodically in beacon messages make them vulnerable to tracking even if beacons are totally anonymous. In this thesis, we consider how to protect vehicles from being tracked while they are sharing sensitive information in beacons. The high beacon rate, high precision of shared information and strict latency constraints of application are the main challenges to our objective. We propose two solutions for this issue. The first one is to send the precise information only every period of time while sending inaccurate beacons in between. The second solution is to use secure group communication to prevent attacker from overhearing broadcast information. Both choices will be implemented and evaluated against a state-of-the-art tracker.