Measuring long-term location privacy in vehicular communication systems

Abstract

a b s t r a c t Vehicular communication systems are an emerging form of communication that enables new ways of cooperation among vehicles, traffic operators, and service providers. However, many vehicular applications rely on continuous and detailed location information of the vehicles, which has the potential to infringe the users' location privacy. A multitude of privacy-protection mechanisms have been proposed in recent years. However, few efforts have been made to develop privacy metrics that can provide a quantitative way to assess the privacy risk, evaluate the effectiveness of a given privacy-enhanced design, and explore the full possibilities of protection methods.In this paper, we present a location privacy metric for measuring location privacy in vehicular communication systems. As computers do not forget and most drivers of motor vehicles follow certain daily driving patterns, if a user's location information is gathered and stored over a period of time, e.g., weeks or months, such cumulative information might be exploited by an adversary performing a location privacy attack to gain useful information on the user's whereabouts. Thus to precisely reflect the underlying privacy values, in our approach we take into account the accumulated information. Specifically, we develop methods and algorithms to process, propagate, and reflect the accumulated information in the privacy measurements. The feasibility and correctness of our approaches are evaluated by various case studies and extensive simulations. Our results show that accumulated information, if available to an adversary, can have a significant impact on location privacy of the users of vehicular communication systems. The methods and algorithms developed in this paper provide detailed insights into location privacy and thus contribute to the development of future-proof, privacy-preserving vehicular communication systems.

A framework for evaluating pseudonym strategies in vehicular ad-hoc networks

“…Ma et al [18] demonstrate threats to location privacy in VANETs posed by accumulated observations over a period of several weeks or months. Buttyán et al evaluate the effectiveness of changing pseudonyms in VANETs against an attacker with limited coverage using a mix zone based model [5].…”

Privacy Preservation Approach in Service Ecosystems

“…In the PRECIOSA project, privacypreservation technology is integrated into co-operative systems to support collaboration between individual travellers, the operators of transport systems, and service providers [16]. The PRECIOSA project provides detailed insights into location privacy in mobile and ad-hoc networks, and contribute to the development of privacy-preserving vehicular communication systems.…”

Post-hoc User Traceability Analysis in Electronic Toll Pricing Systems

“…Users tend to have regular mobility patterns, which has been greatly discussed in the literature (e.g., see [2,3]). This implies that a user's traces in different sessions should also have some similarity.…”

“…Meanwhile, this also causes more privacy concerns as more user records are collected by the system. For instance, by processing location records, the toll server can learn users' home addresses or medical information [2]. User mobility pattens can also be extracted [3], which are useful to construct user profiles.…”