Protecting Vehicle Privacy against AI-Enhanced Attackers in Intelligent Transportation Systems

Abstract:

Connected and autonomous vehicles in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) rely on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication to maintain safe inter-vehicle spacing. However, such communications, which frequently update the vehicle’s position, threaten privacy by allowing an eavesdropper to potentially track vehicles through their journey.

Mix-zones, which are zones of radio silence where vehicles can change their pseudonyms and thus attempt to throw off potential trackers, have been proposed to deal with this problem. Mix-zones are most effective when placed in high traffic intersections but may cause traffic throughput reduction. We present a mix-zone placement algorithm that allows controlling the tradeoff between vehicle anonymity and a reduced traffic throughput. We then present a new traffic management algorithm within mix-zones that enhances vehicles’ privacy. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm against a sophisticated attacker, that unlike prior publications, is making use of a powerful supervised machine learning algorithm.   Finally, to deal with traffic patterns changes (with time-of-day, day-of-week, and season) we present an approach to place mix-zones dynamically to match the prevailing traffic pattern. Extensive simulations, based on New York City and Boston traffic, are presented to validate the advantages of our algorithms.

 

Short Bio:

Israel Koren is a Professor Emeritus of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and a fellow of the IEEE. He has been a consultant to companies like IBM, Analog Devices, Intel, AMD and National Semiconductors. His research interests include Fault-Tolerant systems, cyber-physical systems, secure cryptographic devices, computer architecture and computer arithmetic. He publishes extensively and has over 300 publications in refereed journals and conferences. He is the author of the textbook "Computer Arithmetic Algorithms," 2nd Edition, A.K.  Peters, Ltd., 2002, and a co-author of the textbook "Fault Tolerant Systems," 2nd Edition, Morgan-Kaufman, 2020.