A Survey on Location Privacy Techniques Deployed in Vehicular Networks

Recent advancements in embedded technologies, pervasive computing, and ubiquitous connectivity have revolutionized our daily lives, making them safe, efficient and convenient as never before. These evolving technologies have not only transformed our workplaces but are also reshaping our living habits, including the way we communicate, travel, learn, and relax. In the field of transportation alone, a huge influx of highly-connected, situation-aware and even self-driving vehicles has been observed recently, thus revamping existing automobiles into smarter, automated and safer vehicular networks. This exponential rise in vehicular connectivity has introduced new terminologies such as Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) and the Internet of Vehicles (IoV), aiming towards road-safety, smart traffic management, and real-time information/incident sharing. However, these highly-connected vehicles have also introduced several novel security and safety threats both to the hosts and associated assets, inducing serious even life-threatening consequences. Compromise of location privacy and vehicular identity is one of such serious threats, which may be exploited by an adversary to launch sophisticated attacks including stalking, identity theft/manipulation or even tracking and sabotaging of VIP moves. Such threat vectors primarily exploit subtle vulnerabilities in resource-constrained communication protocols being deployed for vehicular connectivity as well as improper security configurations of associated systems. The threats can be countered by placement of robust network security techniques suiting the VANET environment. This survey paper aims to probe into these vulnerabilities of vehicular networks, classify associated security and safety threats, and ultimately asses various countermeasures to safeguard against privacy-breach situations. Besides presenting a holistic overview of emerging threats in vehicular networks, the paper critically analyzes some of the recent approaches (2008-2018) to safeguard against location privacy threats with reference to a range of operational and security considerations.