MPFSLP: Masqueraded Probabilistic Flooding for Source-Location Privacy in VANETs

A major impediment to the adoption of vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) today is their privacy and security concerns. In this paper, we address the privacy aspects of VANETs. Specifically we build a scheme that provides non-repudiation, message authentication, integrity, and non-traceability (or source location privacy) while maintaining low overhead in communication to support the security requirements for the beaconing mechanism. Our scheme leverages the fact that an endpoint only requires the knowledge of the location and velocity of another endpoint and not its identity, thereby our mechanism introduces confusion in the mapping form identity of nodes to packets. Each node can send any other node's packet masquerading as its own packet. We further introduce causal dependence amongst masqueraded packets to ensure non-repudiation. Our scheme reduces traceability by 6× when compared to baseline pseudonym changing schemes.