Pseudonym changing strategy with multiple mix zones for trajectory privacy protection in road networks

Summary In road network, vehicles' location may be identified, and their transmissions may even tracked by eavesdrops (eg, safety messages) that contain sensitive personal information such as identity and location of the vehicle. This type of communication leads to breaking the users' trajectory privacy. Frequently changing pseudonyms are widely accepted as a solution that protects the trajectory privacy of users in road networks. However, this solution may become invalid if a vehicle changes its pseudonym at an improper occasion. To cope with this issue, we presented an efficient pseudonym change strategy with multiple mix zones scheme to provide trajectory privacy for road network. In addition, we protected vehicles against linkability attack by cheating mechanism. Henceforth, we constructed a cheating detection mechanism which allows the vehicles to verify whether the pseudonym change process is successful or not and also detect to malicious vehicles. In this way, users' trajectory privacy can be improved. Finally, by taking the anonymity set size (ASS) as the trajectory privacy metric, we exhibit by means of simulations that the proposed scheme is effective in multiple networks scenarios.