Nowhere to hide?: Mix-Zones for Private Pseudonym Change using Chaff Vehicles
2018 (English)In: IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference, VNC, 2018Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
In vehicular communication systems, cooperative awareness messages provide contextual information required for transportation safety and efficiency applications. However, without the appropriate design, these messages introduce a new attack vector to compromise passenger privacy. The use of ephemeral credentials - pseudonyms - was therefore proposed, essentially to split a journey into unlinkable segments. To protect segment transitions, encrypted mix-zones provide regions where vehicles can covertly change their pseudonyms. While previous work focused on the placement, shape, and protocols for mix-zones, attacks that correlate vehicles entering and existing these zones still remain a problem. Furthermore, existing schemes have only considered homogeneous traffic, disregarding variations in vehicle density due to differences in driver population, road layout, and time of day. Without realistic experimental results, any conclusion on real-world applicability is precarious. In this paper, we address this challenge and present a novel scheme that works independent of vehicles' mobility patterns. More precisely, our system generates fictive chaff vehicles when needed and broadcasts their traces, while it remains unobtrusive if sufficiently many vehicles are present. This greatly improves privacy protection in situations with inherently low traffic density, e.g., suburban areas, and during low traffic periods. Our scheme ensure that an external attacker cannot distinguish between real and chaff vehicles, while legitimate vehicles can recognize chaff messages; this is important, because chaff vehicles (and messages) must not affect the operation of safety applications. In our evaluation, we compare our chaff-based approach with an existing cryptographic mix-zone scheme. Our results under realistic traffic conditions show that by introducing fictive vehicles, traffic flow variations can be smoothed and privacy protection can be enhanced up to 76%.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2018.
Keywords [en]
Cooperative communication, Cryptography, Appropriate designs, Contextual information, External attacker, Privacy protection, Realistic traffics, Safety applications, Transportation safety, Vehicular communications, Vehicles
National Category
Natural Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:ri:diva-38225DOI: 10.1109/VNC.2018.8628449Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-85062511832ISBN: 9781538694282 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:ri-38225DiVA, id: diva2:1301533
Conference
2018 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference, VNC 2018, 5 December 2018 through 7 December 2018
Note
; Funding details: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council; Funding details: Stiftelsen för Strategisk Forskning; Funding text 1: This work has been partially supported by the Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research (SSF) SURPRISE project and the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).
2019-04-022019-04-022019-04-02Bibliographically approved