Privacy-preserving multilevel obfuscation scheme for vehicular network

For accessing various location-based services (LBS), a device needs to update its location frequently. The vehicle requires to exchange location messages with LBS while moving on the road network. These messages contain sensitive information of vehicles, that is, location, identity, direction, and other contents. LBS is not trusted and may conspire with an adversary to capture the location messages and based on the location information the adversary tracks the future location spots of the vehicle driver. Existing location privacy schemes require the collaboration of neighbor vehicles to anonymize their location. However, such collaboration needs the consent of the neighbor vehicles. In addition, the messages exchanged with LBS contain the real identity of a vehicle and the vehicle is exposed to identity threat. In this article, we propose a multilevel location privacy scheme (MLPS) for a vehicle using location services. The vehicle generates duplicate messages by taking location positions of transmission range vehicles to anonymize its location and identity. We simulate the proposed scheme for various vehicle traffic densities. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme MLPS is more efficient than the existing scheme in terms of anonymity set size, location obfuscation, and location traceability. The MLPS reduces the vehicle location traceability from 50% to 1% compared with the existing scheme.