VIPER: A vehicle-to-infrastructure communication privacy enforcement protocol

Privacy-related issues are crucial for the wide diffusion of Vehicular Communications (VC). In particular, traffic analysis is one of the subtler threats to privacy in VC. In this paper we first briefly review current work in literature addressing privacy issues. Then we present VIPER: a Vehicle-to-infrastructure communication Privacy Enforcement pRotocol. VIPER is inspired to solutions provided for the Internet -mix- and cryptography-universal re- encryption. The protocol is shown to be resilient to traffic analysis attacks and analytical results suggest that it also performs well with respect to two key performance indicators: queue occupancy and message delivery time. Finally, simulation results support our analytical findings.