VBPC: Velocity based pseudonym changing strategy to protect location privacy of vehicles in VANET

The protection of location privacy of vehicle driver in Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is an important security issue. On tracking the location information of vehicle may expose private information to adversary, which may leads serious threats to vehicle. Several location privacy approaches have been proposed to protect the location privacy of vehicle driver, but there are limitations, which hamper to fully utilize and provides an efficient privacy protection in VANET. In this paper, our contribution is twofold, firstly, we analyze existing location privacy techniques proposed in the scenario of VANET and highlight their limitations. Secondly we propose a new Velocity Based Pseudonym Changing (VBPC) strategy for preserving location privacy of vehicles in VANET. We evaluate the performance of VBPC in terms of Anonymity Set Size (ASS) metric and pseudonym changing. The simulation results show that VBPC is an efficient strategy to protect location information of vehicle drivers in terms of average privacy strength and pseudonym changing when compared with VLPZ and PCS strategy.