A Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Location-Based Services in the Internet of Vehicles

Ubiquitous information exchange is achieved among connected vehicles through the increasingly smart environment.The concept of conventional vehicular ad hoc network is gradually transformed into the Internet of vehicles(IoV).Meanwhile,more and more locationbased services(LBSs)are created to provide convenience for drivers.However,the frequently updated location information sent to the LBS server also puts user location privacy at risk.Thus,preserve user location privacy while allowing vehicles to have high-quality LBSs is a critical issue.Many solutions have been proposed in the literature to preserve location privacy.However,most of them cannot provide real-time LBS with accurate location updates.In this paper,we propose a novel location privacy-preserving scheme,which allows vehicles to send accurate real-time location information to the LBS server while preventing being tracked by attackers.In the proposed scheme,a vehicle utilizes the location information of selected shadow vehicles,whose route diverge from the requester,to generate multiple virtual trajectories to the LBS server so as to mislead attackers.Simulation results show that our proposed scheme achieves a high privacy-preserving level and outperforms other state-of-the-art schemes in terms of location entropy and tracking success ratio.