The Problem of Privacy in Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS)

A Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System is a transportation system where involved stations can sense their environments and communicate with each other in order to take certain decisions. Many applications are being proposed such as cooperative crash avoidance. However, the information exchanged between the stations may lead an adversary to determine the identity and also the behavior of the stations. Therefore, privacy preservation is an important requirement on C-ITS. Privacy is defined through: anonymity, pseudonymity, unlinkability and unobservability. The anonymity of an ITS station is preserved by assigning it a pseudonym. A pseudonym is a set of attributes related or not to the true identity of the station which must never be used in the communication. To avoid a pseudonym to become a permanent identity, it has to be changed according to all the attributes, over the time to assure unlinkability and unobservability. This paper summarizes the state of the art we undertake in order to implement privacy preservation mechanisms in Network Simulator 3 (NS3) simulation in the context of the European Scoop@F project.