A location privacy protection scheme based on random encryption period for VSNs

Vehicle social networks (VSNs) are VANETs characterized by social aspect. For VSNs, it’s very crucial to ensure its location privacy. Pseudonym is considered as an effective way to resist adversary’s tracking, which ensures that each pseudonym holder communicates each other depending on such a virtual identity, but can not link to holder’s real identity. This paper proposes a novel location privacy protection scheme for VSNs. With the help of RSU, when vehicles need to change the pseudonyms, they will cooperate with the neighbors to create the encrypted area through group key encryption and the external adversary cannot crack the message in this area. During this period, some vehicles change the pseudonyms jointly so that the external adversary can not associate the pseudonyms before and after, which achieves the goal of location privacy protection. The security and performance indicate the proposed scheme is reasonable.