Reputation-based Pseudonym Change for Location Privacy in vehicular networks

Abstract

Location privacy is an important issue in vehicular networks since knowledge of a vehicle's location can result in leakage of sensitive information. A way to protect vehicles' location privacy is to have them change their pseudonyms in pre-determined regions known as mix-zones. However, selfish users may not change their pseudonyms because of the overhead occurring in this process. This could jeopardize the location privacy of those users who are in need of changing their pseudonyms. In order to encourage users to cooperate in changing their pseudonyms, we propose a method named Reputation-based Pseudonym Change for Location Privacy (RPCLP). With RPCLP, users earn reputation “credit” by implementing a change of pseudonym. Performance analysis shows that the RPCLP scheme not only motivates selfish users to cooperate with each other, but also reduces overhead while maintaining the desired location privacy.