Home // SECURWARE 2023, The Seventeenth International Conference on Emerging Security Information, Systems and Technologies // View article

Privacy-preserving Vehicle Tracking Using Homomorphic Encryption

Authors:
Hoang Anh Bui
Simy Chacko
Duc Cuong Nguyen

Keywords: Homomorphic encryption; privacy preserving; location tracking; trajectory monitoring

Abstract:
Transportation systems use location data to track and coordinate vehicle fleets. As locations pertain to sensitive information of users, privacy has become a key concern. Users can be tracked without their consent; location data could be (unintentionally) leaked, leading to costly consequences. Existing work on solving this problem often relies on using trusted servers for computation, or on masking, anonymization, obfuscation techniques on untrusted servers. Hence, either a trusted server is needed, or one must trade data utilization for privacy, unfortunately. Homomorphic encryption could be leveraged on location-based services to eliminate the need of using user’s raw location while certain computations on encrypted data are still permitted. However, homomorphic encryption (1) only allows certain arithmetic (i.e., addition, multiplication) operations on encrypted data, and (2) incurs significant performance overhead. This impedes the application of homomorphic encryption in preserving the privacy of user in location-based services. This paper presents a novel approach to track a vehicle using homo- morphic encryption. To this end, we propose a communication scheme that allows a vehicle to report its encrypted location to an untrusted cloud service. We design an efficient algorithm on homomorphically encrypted data to determine if vehicles are following predefined trips using advanced transformation techniques. Our evaluation shows that we can indeed flexibly employ homomorphic encryption in privacy-preserving location tracking with acceptable performance overhead. Our work only needs ≈ 6 milliseconds to compute results on encrypted location.

Pages: 11 to 17

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2023

Publication date: September 25, 2023

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2162-2116

ISBN: 978-1-68558-092-6

Location: Porto, Portugal

Dates: from September 25, 2023 to September 29, 2023