Secure transport container monitoring protocol with container anonymity

Abstract

Since 9.11 terror attack in the United States, the smart container has attracted the attention because of the efficiency and safety of container freight shipping. In 2007, Lauf and Sauff proposed MASC-ST protocol for securely transmitting sensitive information gathered from sensors equipped in the transport container to a trusted third party that controls access to this information. Recently, Lee showed that the protocol has some weaknesses and also presented an improvement to overcome the weaknesses while preserving the merits of their scheme. However, these protocols did not consider the anonymity of container. So, the transport route of containers can simply be tracked by malicious attackers. In this paper, we propose a secure transport container monitoring protocol that is resistant against various attacks and is able to guarantee the anonymity of the container. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.