On Preventing Location Attacks for Urban Vehicular Networks

The prevalence of global positioning system (GPS) equipped in vehicular networks exposes users’ location information to the location-based services. We argue that such data contains rich informative cues on drivers’ private behaviors and preferences, which will lead to the location privacy attacks. In this paper, we proposed a sophisticated prediction model to predict driver’s next location by using ak-order Markov chain-based third-rank tensor representing the partially observed transfer information of vehicles. Then Bayesian Personalized Ranking (BPR) is used to learn the unobserved transitions within the tensor for transition predication. Experimental results manifest the efficacy of the proposed model in terms of location predication accuracy, compared with several state-of-the-art predication methods. We also point out that the precision achieved by such advanced predication model is restricted to the order of the Markov chaink. Accordingly, we propose a schema to decrease the risks of such attacks by preventing the conformation of higher order Markov chain. Experimental results obtained based on the real-world vehicular network data demonstrated the effectiveness of our proposed schema.