In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), pseudonym change is considered as the vital mechanism to support vehicles' anonymity. Due to the complicated road conditions and network environment, it is a challenge to design an efficient and adaptive pseudonym change protocol. In this paper, a pseudonym change protocol for location privacy preserving (PCP) is proposed. We first present the requirements of pseudonym change in different scenarios. According to variable network states and road conditions, vehicles are able to take different pseudonym change strategies to resist the tracking by global passive adversaries. Furthermore, the registration protocol, authentication protocol, pseudonym issuance protocol, and pseudonym revocation protocol are introduced for the pseudonym management mechanism. As a consequence, it is not feasible for global passive adversaries to track a vehicle for a long time and obtain the trajectory of the vehicle. The analysis results show that the security and performance of PCP are improved compared with the traditional ones.
Keywords: VANETs; location privacy; pseudonym change.