Enhancing Security and Privacy in Traffic-Monitoring Systems

Intelligent transportation systems increasingly depend on probe vehicles to monitor traffic: they can automatically report position, travel time, traffic incidents, and road surface problems to a telematics service provider. This kind of traffic-monitoring system could provide good coverage and timely information on many more roadways than is possible with a fixed infrastructure such as cameras and loop detectors. This approach also promises significant reductions in infrastructure cost because the system can exploit the sensing, computing, and communications devices already installed in many modern vehicles. This architecture separates data from identities by splitting communication from data analysis. Data suppression techniques can help prevent data mining algorithms from reconstructing private information from anonymous database samples