Study of the impact of pseudonym change mechanisms on vehicular safety

Abstract

The design of privacy protection mechanisms which reconcile privacy and safety becomes a strong requirement in vehicular communication. Pseudonym change, which is a largely accepted solution to protect vehicular privacy, may conflict with the road safety requirements. In this paper, we investigate the impact of existing pseudonym change mechanisms on vehicular safety using simulations. Our study shows that existing pseudonym change mechanisms generate a gap between the real vehicular neighborhood view and the one obtained when using pseudonym change mechanisms. It also show that pseudonym change may impact the anticipation of dangerous situation which highly degrades road safety.