Infrastructure-Independent Pseudonym Swap Protocol for Vehicular Networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) are increasingly gaining the attention of academic institutions, governments, and automobile manufacturers due to their prospect to offer safety, traffic efficiency, and infotainment services to drivers and passengers. However, they suffer from location privacy leakage as vehicles must periodically transmit unencrypted beacon messages. One of the techniques proposed to preserve location privacy in the literature is pseudonym swap. However, existing pseudonym swap schemes either depend on Roadside Units (RSUs) or ignore VANET security requirements. Therefore, we propose a new pseudonym swap scheme that addresses the existing issues by using non-swappable and swappable pseudonyms. Moreover, vehicles simultaneously and randomly change pseudonyms soon after swapping, an approach that further enhances privacy in our scheme. The simulation experiments show that our scheme performs better in confusing a tracking adversary than the existing schemes.