A privacy-aware location service for VANETs using Chaum's mixes

Abstract

Protecting the privacy of VANET users is an important issue. We present in this paper an architecture that aims at this goal by integrating Chaum's mix network into a distributed but infrastructure-based location service for position-based routing. In addition we enable the user to decide when he wants to reveal his position to anyone else. Thus neither entity of the VANET is in full knowledge about the location and the identity of any user at the same time. The proposed system can be integrated in most published VANET security frameworks and our evaluation shows the implementation is feasible.