A Simple Privacy Preserving Route Tracing Mechanism for VANET

Route tracing allows authorities to determine the route traversed by a vehicle, which can be used valuably in crime investigations. In VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork), a conditional anonymity scheme is normally used to meet the conflicting demands of the government (authentication) and users (privacy). These schemes provide a mechanism to revoke the anonymity of individual beacons sent by vehicles. However, using this mechanism to trace a route of a vehicle violates privacy of many other vehicles. In this paper, we provide a simple route tracing mechanism that reveals only the route of the targeted vehicle. The proposed method can be easily added to any existing VANET solutions and also includes a way to prevent authorities from abusing this new function.