A Sensitivity-based Location Privacy Protection Scheme in Vehicular Networks

In recent times, the issue of vehicle location privacy has received increasing attention. Location-based services (LBSs) require users’ location information to be constantly updated to service providers, which causes the location information to be speculated and attacked by malicious entities. The pseudonym schemes offer a viable solution to the aforementioned problem, but existing pseudonym schemes do not provide differentiated protection for users’ varying locations, thereby increasing the possibility of location information leakage. To address this concern, we propose a sensitivity-based pseudonym exchange mechanism, which leverages the vehicle’s historical track record to extract features and enable customized location privacy protection. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing approaches in achieving location privacy.