Obfuscation-based location privacy-preserving scheme in cloud-enabled internet of vehicles

The Cloud-Enabled Internet of Vehicles (CE-IoV) is a new paradigm that combines cloud computing, vehicular networks and the internet of things (IoT). It provides safety and infotainment applications for road users. It relies on the exchange of real-time messages known as beacons to achieve connectivity and ensure safety. The beacons contain the position, the identifier and the velocity of the vehicle. This data can be eavesdropped by a malicious attacker to construct a full trajectory of a target vehicle and track its user. The tracking violates the on-road users’ location privacy. It is the cyber-equivalent of stalking. Its consequences may be directly related to the user’s safety. Therefore, the privacy issue in CE-IoV is crucial and preserving it is a priority. In this paper, we propose a location privacy preserving solution for CE-IoV users. The solution relies on cooperativeness, obfuscation, and silence to reduce linkability and tracking. We proved its feasibility using a game theoretic approach. We further analysed the with simulations the proposed scheme performance and resiliency to Global Passive Attacker (GPA). The modelled GPA executes four eavesdropping and linking attacks to track the vehicles which are: semantic, syntactic, observation and mapping linking attacks. The simulation results prove that the solution is robust and resilient to the mentioned attacks with an average privacy level of 90%. We further analyse its robustness using an analytical model.