A Context Aware and Traffic Adaptive Privacy Scheme in VANETs

Preserving privacy in VANETs is a significant challenge for users and public acceptance of VANETs. The use of a pseudonym is a common technique for enhancing the user’s privacy in VANETs. Several Pseudonym Changing Schemes (PCS) for user’s privacy in VANETs have been proposed. The highly dynamic topology of the vehicular network can impact the way the pseudonymous identifiers are changed. To make these changes inconspicuous, we introduce the Context-Aware and Traffic Adaptive privacy scheme, which takes into account the rapidly changing traffic condition. In this paper, we propose a new PCS that aims to benefit the most from the context of the vehicle and traffic patterns to leverage a suitable situation for changing pseudonyms that increases anonymity. The vehicles change the pseudonym simultaneously in a region to increase privacy by maximizing the anonymity set. The proposed approach is evaluated in the presence of an adversary actor who could engineer privacy attacks against any given PCS.