Maximizing anonymity of a vehicle

Abstract

As a vehicle moves on the road and communicates with other vehicles or road side units, communication identity and physical identity may be linked by estimating its position. This is threat to its privacy. However, as it moves its location changes. This breaks the correlation between the vehicle and its location. The change in location also changes the neighborhood of the vehicle. This change in size and nature of neighborhood may reduce the anonymity of a vehicle. This paper addresses the challenges in providing anonymity to a moving vehicle through optimal pseudonym update. It is shown that the effective size of anonymity set reduces drastically due to change in the neighbors. The work studies the possibility that a node may retain its anonymity by updating identities in the vicinity of other vehicles to decorrelate its location and identity relation. A heuristic that allows a vehicle to switch its identity to maximize anonymity preservation is proposed. Simulation results show that updating pseudonyms in accordance to the heuristic maximizes the anonymity of a vehicle by enhancing the effective crowd cover.