Positioning information privacy in intelligent transportation systems: An overview and future perspective

Today, the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are already in deep integration phase all over the world. One of the most significant enablers for ITS are vehicle positioning and tracking techniques. Worldwide integration of ITS employing Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) and European standard for vehicular communication, known as ETSI ITS-G5, brings a variety of options to improve the positioning in areas where GPS connectivity is lacking precision. Utilization of the ready infrastructure, next-generation cellular 5G networks, and surrounding electronic devices together with conventional positioning techniques could become the solution to improve the overall ITS operation in vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication scenario. Nonetheless, effective and secure communication protocols between the vehicle and roadside units should be both analyzed and improved in terms of potential attacks on the transmitted positioning-related data. In particular, said information might be misused or stolen at the infrastructure side conventionally assumed to be trusted. In this paper, we first survey different methods of vehicle positioning, which is followed by an overview of potential attacks on ITS systems. Next, we propose potential improvements allowing mutual authentication between the vehicle and infrastructure aiming at improving positioning data privacy. Finally, we propose a vision on the development and standardization aspects of such systems.