Privacy and Security of Connected Vehicles in Intelligent Transportation System

The paper considers data security and privacy issues in intelligent transportation systems which involve data streams coming out from individual vehicles to road side units. In this environment, there are issues in regards to the scalability of key management and computation limitations at the edge of the network. To address these issues, we suggest the formation of groups in the vehicular layer, where a group leader is assigned to communicate with group members and the road side unit. We propose a lightweight permutation mechanism for preserving the confidentiality and privacy of sensory data.

I. Introduction

As shown in Fig. 1 , the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) uses a hierarchical architecture, where the bottom layer includes sensors/actuators (IoT devices), such as the mass air flow sensor, the engine speed sensor, oxygen sensor, manifold absolute pressure sensor, and voltage sensor. The second layer includes groups of vehicles that drive as a group together. The vehicles in a group use Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications to coordinate their decisions with one another. The third layer includes road zones that can include many groups of vehicles. In this layer, vehicles are subscribed to a Road Side Unit (RSU) through Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communications. The RSU monitors road zones and communicates the road rules (speed limit and road toll) and hazards to the vehicles. The fourth layer includes local regions that include a larger area with many zones. Finally, the top layer includes the central traffic control system that collects data from vehicles across all regions, such as an area of a city, and provides longer-term data storage and deep analytics.