Secure model to share data in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Cars have become essential elements of modern life. But nowadays the increasing number of cars also leads to problems: pollution, traffic jams leading to wasted time spent in traffic. Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) demonstrate innovative services relating to different modes of transport and traffic management, and enable various users to be better informed and make safer, more coordinated, and smart use of transport networks. To capture accurate models of the traffic, many ITS rely on users to willingly contribute data captured by sensors made available by personal mobile devices. This way, mobile devices become ubiquituous sensing devices, able to cover any area where users are present. However, for the user, sharing such data can quickly lead to privacy and security issues, such as disclosing location to unintended audience. Obviously, all ITS application should include security as one priority requirement, but unfortunately not many do so. In this paper, we answer the question: “How could ITS applications, even existing ones, include privacy guarantees they can show to the users contributing their private data?”. We propose a model where users can define data sharing policies associated with their personal information flows captured by an ITS application. Under this model, ITS applications might need to use specific data under various quality and context-based constraints, while the user-oriented security policies could specify additional usage constraints, and we propose a solution to mediate between these two sides. We evaluate a pilot security implementation of the model, and evaluate it under real-world assumptions.