A Novel Attack Tree Based Risk Assessment Approach for Location Privacy Preservation in the VANETs

Even though emerging as a promising approach to increase road safety, efficiency and convenience, Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) pose many new research challenges, especially on the aspect of location privacy. The existing literatures focus on preventive techniques to achieve location privacy protection, however the location privacy risk assessment receives less attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel risk assessment method to evaluate the security risk of VANET's privacy based on attack tree. The proposed scheme provides a general analysis framework to estimate the degree that a certain threat might bring to the VANETs. We also use the constructed attack tree to identify possible attack scenarios that an attacker may launch towards the privacy preserving system in VANETs, which is expected to further improve the system security.