PeRA: Individual Privacy Control in Intelligent Transportation Systems

In the domain of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) manufacturers and service providers start to implement and deploy plenty of (new) applications running on a vehicle. These applications involve the user and external services. Therefore, we must incorporate mechanisms providing the individual for controlling his/her privacy. Existing approaches only consider to control the event of data access using a central instance. In contrast, we consider to implement individual privacy requirements for the complete data flow of distributed systems. The Privacy-enforcing Runtime Architecture (PeRA) provides a holistic privacy protection approach, which implements user-defined privacy policies. A data-centric protection chain ensures that ITS components process data according to attached privacy policies. PeRA instances constitute a distributed privacy middleware, which evaluates privacy policies to mediate data access by applications. The PeRA architecture includes an integrity protection layer to create a distributed policy enforcement perimeter between ITS nodes, which prevents the circumvention of policies. We implemented the PeRA architecture as a proof-of-concept prototype.