TCCM: A Chaff-Based Mix-Zone Strategy for Enhancing Location Privacy in VANET

Location privacy is a crucial factor to consider in the vehicular ad hoc networks. The plaintext broadcast of information such as location and speed during vehicle communication is vulnerable to eavesdroppers, leading to risks of user privacy breaches. While current pseudonym-changing strategies can provide some level of privacy protection, their effectiveness is limited against attackers with machine learning capabilities. Moreover, some strategies, such as encryption and silence mechanisms, may introduce additional delay and communication overhead, making it difficult to ensure both road safety and location privacy simultaneously.This paper proposes a Trajectory Converged Chaff-Based Mix-zone strategy (TCCM). This strategy generates chaff messages within a mix-zone that resembles the real vehicle trajectory, confusing eavesdroppers, reducing traceability, increasing entropy within the mix-zone, and minimizing the overhead of chaff. Additionally, the strategy does not rely on encryption or silence mechanisms, ensuring the safety of vehicle operations. Furthermore, TCCM utilizes a genetic algorithm to optimize the deployment locations of the mix-zones to maximize privacy protection for vehicles.