Bastian Bloessl, Christoph Sommer, Falko Dressler and David Eckhoff, "The Scrambler Attack: A Robust Physical Layer Attack on Location Privacy in Vehicular Networks," Proceedings of 4th IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2015), CNC Workshop, Anaheim, CA, February 2015, pp. 395-400.

Abstract

Vehicular networks provide the basis for a wide range of both safety and non-safety applications. One of the key challenges for wide acceptance is to which degree the drivers’ privacy can be protected. The main technical privacy protection mechanism is the use of changing identifiers (from MAC to application layer), so called pseudonyms. The effectiveness of this approach, however, is clearly reduced if specific characteristics of the physical layer (e.g., in the transmitted signal) reveal the link between two messages with different pseudonyms. In this paper, we present such a fingerprinting technique: the scrambler attack. In contrast to other physical layer fingerprinting methods, it does not rely on potentially fragile features of the channel or the hardware, but exploits the transmitted scrambler state that each receiver has to derive in order to decode a packet, making this attack extremely robust. We show how the scrambler attack bypasses the privacy protection mechanism of state-of-the-art approaches and quantify the degradation of drivers' location privacy with an extensive simulation study. Based on our results, we identify additional technological requirements in order to enable privacy protection mechanisms on a large scale.

Quick access

Original Version DOI (at publishers web site)
Authors' Version PDF (PDF on this web site)
BibTeX BibTeX

Contact

Bastian Bloessl
Christoph Sommer
Falko Dressler
David Eckhoff

BibTeX reference

@inproceedings{bloessl2015scrambler,
    address = {Anaheim, CA},
    author = {Bloessl, Bastian and Sommer, Christoph and Dressler, Falko and Eckhoff, David},
    booktitle = {4th IEEE International Conference on Computing, Networking and Communications (ICNC 2015), CNC Workshop},
    doi = {10.1109/ICCNC.2015.7069376},
    month = {February},
    pages = {395-400},
    publisher = {IEEE},
    title = {{The Scrambler Attack: A Robust Physical Layer Attack on Location Privacy in Vehicular Networks}},
    year = {2015},
   }

Copyright notice

Links to final or draft versions of papers are presented here to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted or distributed for commercial purposes without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

The following applies to all papers listed above that have IEEE copyrights: Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

The following applies to all papers listed above that are in submission to IEEE conference/workshop proceeedings or journals: This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible.

The following applies to all papers listed above that have ACM copyrights: ACM COPYRIGHT NOTICE. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept., ACM, Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org.

The following applies to all SpringerLink papers listed above that have Springer Science+Business Media copyrights: The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com.