Improving location privacy in mix-zones for VANETs

Providing location privacy to users is one of the important issues that must be addressed in Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks. Recent solutions address it by using cryptographic “mix-zones”, which are anonymizing regions where nodes change their temporary identities (pseudonym) without being tracked. However, existing solutions are vulnerable to internal attackers since within a mix-zone messages are encrypted using a group secret key. In this paper we improve location privacy of mix-zones via extensions to the CMIX protocol. By carrying out extensive simulations, we investigate and compare the effective location privacy provided by the proposed approach.