Sacrificing the Plum Tree for the Peach Tree: A Socialspot Tactic for Protecting Receiver-Location Privacy in VANET

In this paper, to simultaneously protect the receiver-location privacy and improve the performance of packet delivery in VANET, we utilize ``Sacrificing the Plum Tree for the Peach Tree" - one of the Thirty-Six Strategies of Ancient China, to propose a socialspot-based packet forwarding (SPF) protocol, where each vehicle receiver only reveals a non-sensitive socialspot, e.g., a shopping mall, that he often visits as a relay node to help packet forwarding and protect his other sensitive locations privacy. Detailed security analysis demonstrates the security of the proposed SPF protocol. In addition, extensive simulations have also been conducted to examine its good efficiency in terms of packet delivery ratio and average delay.