Using Searchable Encryption to Protect Privacy in Connected Cars

Providing vehicles with extended connectivity introduces new opportunities for services, and also security applications such as misbehavior detection. However, for many applications, personal data needs to be processed by the system providers, which impairs the privacy of the vehicle users. While focusing our research on new possibilities of connected car security, we follow privacy by design principles. We explore the utilisation of various privacy-enhancing technologies (PET) in order to provide advanced connected car applications, while preserving the personal data of the vehicle users. Specifically, we aim to develop practical schemes that utilise Searchable Encryption to provide a framework for secure and privacypreserving connected car applications

Emerging privacy challenges and approaches in CAV systems

The growth of Internet-connected devices, Internet-enabled services and Internet of Things systems continues at a rapid pace, and their application to transport systems is heralded as game-changing. Numerous developing CAV (Connected and Autonomous Vehicle) functions, such as traffic planning, optimisation, management, safety-critical and cooperative autonomous driving applications, rely on data from various sources. The efficacy of these functions is highly dependent on the dimensionality, amount and accuracy of the data being shared. It holds, in general, that the greater the amount of data available, the greater the efficacy of the function. However, much of this data is privacy-sensitive, including personal, commercial and research data. Location data and its correlation with identity and temporal data can help infer other personal information, such as home/work locations, age, job, behavioural features, habits, social relationships. This work categorises the emerging privacy challenges and solutions for CAV systems and identifies the knowledge gap for future research, which will minimise and mitigate privacy concerns without hampering the efficacy of the functions