Secure and Privacy Preserving Urban Sensing Systems

Abstract: The emergence of resource-rich mobile devices and smart vehicles has paved the way for Urban Sensing. In this new paradigm, users sense their environment and become part of an unprecedented large-scale network of sensors, with extensive spatial and temporal coverage, that enables the collection and dissemination of real-time information, practically, from anywhere. Urban sensing can facilitate the deployment of innovative applications that can address the ever-growing concerns for citizens’ well-being. Nevertheless, the openness of such systems (ideally anyone can participate) and the richness of the data users contribute unavoidably raise significant concerns for both the security of urban sensing applications and the privacy of the participating users. In this thesis we consider different urban sensing application domains: vehicular communication networks, intelligent transportation systems and environmental monitoring applications. We begin with a detailed analysis of the security and privacy requirements of these applications domains. Our objective is to protect users from the system (by ensuring their anonymity and privacy) and urban sensing systems from malicious users (by holding malicious users accountable of their actions). This is not straight-forward; anonymity may tempt malicious user behavior, compromising the reliability of the entire urban sensing system.Towards that, we design and implement secure and privacy-preserving identity management systems that can accommodate these requirements. We demonstrate their efficiency, practicality, and scalability through extensive experimental evaluations. Furthermore, we formally evaluate formally their security and privacy preserving properties.