Pseudonymity in VANETS and its implications on the vehicular communication protocol stacks

Abstract: Vehicular Communication (VC) network technology is in the verge of real world deployment. The technology is aimed at achieving high levels of traffic efficiency security and comfort for the users of the traffic system. The technology facilitates exchange of awareness and notification messages among the vehicles to improve the traffic efficiency and safety of the drivers. However, deployment of this awesome technology faces several security and privacy risks. The system is subjected to security risks like replay attacks, nodes sending false information to the system, denial of service attacks by clogging the networks. System also faces several privacy challenges in which sensitive user data can be eavesdropped and also tracing out a particular node using the location data sent by the node. In this research we focused on protecting the privacy of the users using the VC system. Several European projects have been working on privacy enhancement techniques for VC environments. Privacy policy enforcement approach from Privacy Enabled Capability In Co-Operative Systems and Safety Applications (PRECIOSA), pseudonym approach from Secure Vehicular Communication (SeVeCom) and Preparing secure V2X Communication Systems (PRESERVE) project which integrates the results from both PRECIOSA and SeVeCom projects are three of those projects considered in this report. This research is more focused on the pseudonym approach proposed by SeVeCom. We discuss the impact of pseudonym change on the communication stack, what other lower layer identifiers need to be changed along with the pseudonym change, and is there any other ways the attacker can still link the messages from a particular node to hamper the nodes privacy. Finally after analyzing the results from the research, we propose a solution to include a new module in the PRESERVE architecture called Identifier Change Management (IDCM) module to improve the anonymity of the user participating in the vehicular communication.