An Approach to Provide Functional Identity Privacy in Future Railway Communications

Abstract

Highly reliable and secure connectivity is vital for railway transportation to optimize its operations, enhance passenger experience and improve safety. The security functions of future railway mobile communications include user identification, authentication, and authorization, and enables data integrity, confidentiality, privacy, and traceability of data origin. The functional identities define the user functional roles in communications and are used in critical applications such as automatic train control as well as for user authentication. With the continuous growth of the cyberattacks, there is a need to improve the railway communication security. The paper presents an approach to provide privacy of the functional identities. The focus is on a new functionality designed as a service which enables the use of temporary identities instead of unique functional identities.