Privacy Challenges with Protecting Live Vehicular Location Context

Abstract

Future Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) will require that vehicles are equipped with Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC). With these DSRC capabilities, new privacy threats are emerging that can be taken advantage of by threat actors with little experience and cheap components. However, the origins of these privacy threats are not limited to the vehicle and its communications, but extend to non-vehicular devices carried by the driver and passengers. A shortcoming of existing work is that it tends to focus on a specific aspect of privacy leakage when attempting to protect location privacy. In doing so, interactions between privacy threats are not considered. In this work, we investigate the privacy surface of a vehicle by considering the many different ways in which location privacy can be leaked. Following this, we identify techniques to protect privacy and that it is insufficient to provide location privacy against a single threat vector. A methodology to calculate the interactions of privacy preserving techniques is used to highlight the need to consider the wider threat landscape and for techniques to collaborate to ensure location privacy is provided against multiple sources of privacy threats where possible.