Privacy for public transportation

  • Authors:
  • Thomas S. Heydt-Benjamin;Hee-Jin Chae;Benessa Defend;Kevin Fu

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA;University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA

  • Venue:
  • PET'06 Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Privacy Enhancing Technologies
  • Year:
  • 2006

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Abstract

We propose an application of recent advances in e-cash, anonymous credentials, and proxy re-encryption to the problem of privacy in public transit systems with electronic ticketing. We discuss some of the interesting features of transit ticketing as a problem domain, and provide an architecture sufficient for the needs of a typical metropolitan transit system. Our system maintains the security required by the transit authority and the user while significantly increasing passenger privacy. Our hybrid approach to ticketing allows use of passive RFID transponders as well as higher powered computing devices such as smartphones or PDAs. We demonstrate security and privacy features offered by our hybrid system that are unavailable in a homogeneous passive transponder architecture, and which are advantageous for users of passive as well as active devices.