Cross-reality Location Privacy Protection in 6G-enabled Vehicular Metaverses: An LLM-enhanced Hybrid Generative Diffusion Model-based Approach

The emergence of 6G-enabled vehicular metaverses enables Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) to operate across physical and virtual spaces through space-air-ground-sea integrated networks. The AVs can deploy AI agents powered by large AI models as personalized assistants, on edge servers to support intelligent driving decision making and enhanced on-board experiences. However, such cross-reality interactions may cause serious location privacy risks, as adversaries can infer AV trajectories by correlating the location reported when AVs request LBS in reality with the location of the edge servers on which their corresponding AI agents are deployed in virtuality. To address this challenge, we design a cross-reality location privacy protection framework based on hybrid actions, including continuous location perturbation in reality and discrete privacy-aware AI agent migration in virtuality. In this framework, a new privacy metric, termed cross-reality location entropy, is proposed to effectively quantify the privacy levels of AVs. Based on this metric, we formulate an optimization problem to optimize the hybrid action, focusing on achieving a balance between location protection, service latency reduction, and quality of service maintenance. To solve the complex mixed-integer problem, we develop a novel LLM-enhanced Hybrid Diffusion Proximal Policy Optimization (LHDPPO) algorithm, which integrates LLM-driven informative reward design to enhance environment understanding with double Generative Diffusion Models-based policy exploration to handle high-dimensional action spaces, thereby enabling reliable determination of optimal hybrid actions. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively mitigates cross-reality location privacy leakage for AVs while maintaining strong user immersion within 6G-enabled vehicular metaverse scenarios.

Blockchain-based Pseudonym Management for Vehicle Twin Migrations in Vehicular Edge Metaverse

Driven by the great advances in metaverse and edge computing technologies, vehicular edge metaverses are expected to disrupt the current paradigm of intelligent transportation systems. As highly computerized avatars of Vehicular Metaverse Users (VMUs), the Vehicle Twins (VTs) deployed in edge servers can provide valuable metaverse services to improve driving safety and on-board satisfaction for their VMUs throughout journeys. To maintain uninterrupted metaverse experiences, VTs must be migrated among edge servers following the movements of vehicles. This can raise concerns about privacy breaches during the dynamic communications among vehicular edge metaverses. To address these concerns and safeguard location privacy, pseudonyms as temporary identifiers can be leveraged by both VMUs and VTs to realize anonymous communications in the physical space and virtual spaces. However, existing pseudonym management methods fall short in meeting the extensive pseudonym demands in vehicular edge metaverses, thus dramatically diminishing the performance of privacy preservation. To this end, we present a cross-metaverse empowered dual pseudonym management framework. We utilize cross-chain technology to enhance management efficiency and data security for pseudonyms. Furthermore, we propose a metric to assess the privacy level and employ a Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning (MADRL) approach to obtain an optimal pseudonym generating strategy. Numerical results demonstrate that our proposed schemes are high-efficiency and cost-effective, showcasing their promising applications in vehicular edge metaverses.