Physics

Anonymity

Vehicular ad hoc network

k-anonymity

Mathematics

Wireless

Metamaterial

Information privacy

Mathematical analysis

Blockchain

Computer science

Cloaking

Scheme (mathematics)

Wireless ad hoc network

Security analysis

Computer security

Optoelectronics

Telecommunications

IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology

While enjoying the convenience brought by Location Based Service (LBS), the location privacy of vehicles in VANET may be disclosed. Distributed k-anonymity, as one of the most popular privacy protection methods, fails to take the trustworthiness of participants into account, resulting in malicious tracing of vehicles, which further leads to the sensitive information leakage, and even the safety threat of personal property. To address this issue, we propose a blockchain enabled trust-based location privacy protection scheme in VANET. Specifically, by analyzing the different requirements of the request vehicle and the cooperative vehicle during the process of constructing the anonymous cloaking region, as well as combining the characteristics of these two roles, we devise the trust management method based on Dirichlet distribution, such that both the requester and the cooperator will only cooperate with the vehicles they trust. Moreover, by employing blockchain, we also proposed the data structure to record the trustworthiness of vehicles on publicly available blocks timely, so that any vehicle can access the historical trust information of counterparties whenever necessary. Finally, the construction process of anonymous cloaking region is presented. Security analysis and extensive experiments indicate that the proposal is resilient to various trust model attacks, it can effectively detect the malicious vehicles, and preserve the location privacy of vehicles in the anonymous cloaking region construction, while the required time delay is limited.

Blockchain Enabled Trust-Based Location Privacy Protection Scheme in VANET