Increasing Mix-Zone Efficacy for Pseudonym Change in VANETs using Chaff Messages

Abstract

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are designed to play a key role in the development of future transportation systems. Although cooperative awareness messages provide the required situational awareness for new safety and efficiency applications, they also introduce a new attack vector to compromise privacy. The use of ephemeral credentials called pseudonyms for privacy protection was proposed while ensuring the required security properties. In order to prevent an attacker from linking old to new pseudonyms, mix-zones provide a region in which vehicles can covertly change their signing material. In this poster, we extend the idea of mix-zones to mitigate pseudonym linking attacks with a mechanism inspired by chaff-based privacy defense techniques for mix-networks. By providing chaff trajectories, our system restores the efficacy of mix-zones to compensate for a lack of vehicles available to participate in the mixing procedure. Our simulation results of a realistic traffic scenario show that a significant improvement is possible.