A Secure Dynamic Mix Zone Pseudonym Changing Scheme Based on Traffic Context Prediction

Traffic context plays an important role in supporting automated driving and intelligent transportation systems. Smart vehicles explore surrounding environments by analyzing sensor data and periodically communicating with neighbors and road infrastructures. The context can be well learned in this way to support driving, but the vehicle trajectory can be also easily exposed under eavesdropping attacks. The pseudonym is proposed to hide the real identity of the vehicles. However, the effectiveness of anonymity, the safety of driving, the convenience of implementation and the utilization of resources in previous approaches have not been well-balanced. Therefore, focusing on efficiently replacing pseudonyms with the premise of ensuring driving safety, we propose a secure dynamic silent mix zone pseudonym changing scheme (TLAS) based on the real-time traffic context prediction for urban regions. It naturally takes the area in front of the red traffic light as a silent mix zone, which avoids the driving security issue caused by signal silence. Besides, the area length is dynamically configured according to the traffic context predicted in the last green light cycle, so the anonymous effect can be improved. In addition, considering the resource utilization and accuracy requirement, the adaptive prediction algorithm is applied. We conduct simulation experiments with real-world traffic history using SUMO and OMNET++, the results show that TLAS strategy can indeed achieve a better anonymous effect (reducing standardized traceability rate by 8.2%) with lower driving speed for safety concern.