Privacy-Preserving Continuous Data Collection for Predictive Maintenance in Vehicular Fog-Cloud

With the advances of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in intelligent transportation systems, collected vehicle data can produce insights on emerging vehicular phenomenon, and further contribute to the further improvement of innovative and efficient vehicular systems. Particularly, by leveraging data collected from vehicle sensors and maintenance models constructed from operation and repair history, predictive maintenance aims to detect the anomalies of vehicles and provide early warnings before the occurrence of failure. However, privacy preservation still remains as one of the top concerns for vehicle owners in predictive maintenance, as the sensory data could potentially violate their location and identity privacy. To address this challenge, in this article, we propose a privacy-preserving and verifiable continuous data collection scheme with the intent of predictive maintenance in vehicular fog, which gathers and organizes the sensor data of each individual vehicle on a sliding window basis. Specifically, our proposed scheme exploits the homomorphic Paillier cryptosystem and truncated alpha-geometric technique to protect the content of each individual piece of sensory data. Meanwhile, our proposed scheme also aggregates and authenticates the collected sensory data reports on a time-series sliding window basis, which achieves the continuous observation of the recently collected vehicular sensory data. Detailed security analysis is carried out to demonstrate the security properties of our proposed scheme, including confidentiality, authentication and privacy preservation. In performance evaluations, we also compare our proposed scheme with a traditional scheme, and our scheme shows great improvement in terms of communication and computation overheads. Furthermore, to show the feasibility of our proposed scheme, we also compare and discuss the expected squared error introduced by the differential privacy mechanism.