An Analysis of the Privacy Threat in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks due to Radio Frequency Fingerprinting

In Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) used in the road transportation sector, privacy risks may arise because vehicles could be tracked on the basis of the information transmitted by the Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications implemented with the Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) standards operating at 5.9 GHz. Various techniques have been proposed in the literature to mitigate these privacy risks including the use of pseudonym schemes, but they are mostly focused on data anonymization at the network and application layer. At the physical layer, the capability to accurately identify and fingerprint wireless devices through their radio frequency (RF) emissions has been demonstrated in the literature. This capability may generate a privacy threat because vehicles can be tracked using the RF emissions of their DSRC devices. This paper investigates the privacy risks related to RF fingerprinting to determine if privacy breaches are feasible in practice. In particular, this paper analyzes the tracking accuracy in challenging RF environments with high attenuation and fading.