WHISPER: A Location Privacy-Preserving Scheme Using Transmission Range Changing for Internet of Vehicles

Internet of Vehicles (IoV) has the potential to enhance road-safety with environment sensing features provided by embedded devices and sensors. This benignant feature also raises privacy issues as vehicles announce their fine-grained whereabouts mainly for safety requirements, adversaries can leverage this to track and identify users. Various privacy-preserving schemes have been designed and evaluated, for example, mix-zone, encryption, group forming, and silent-period-based techniques. However, they all suffer inherent limitations. In this paper, we review these limitations and propose WHISPER, a safety-aware location privacy-preserving scheme that adjusts the transmission range of vehicles in order to prevent continuous location monitoring. We detail the set of protocols used by WHISPER, then we compare it against other privacy-preserving schemes. The results show that WHISPER outperformed the other schemes by providing better location privacy levels while still fulfilling road-safety requirements.