Secure, privacy-preserving, distributed motor vehicle event data recorder

Similar to flight data recorder (”blackbox”), motor vehicle event data recorder (MVEDR) is a device installed on a vehicle to record information related to the vehicle´s conditions. This information is useful for accident investigation but there are cases of loss or complete destruction of MVEDRs after serious accidents. On the other hand, Vehicular Ad-hoc NETwork (VANET) is an emerging infrastructure with roadside units (RSUs) installed along the roads to communicate with the vehicles. This triggers our idea of virtual distributed MVEDRs using VANET. Conceptually, event data is transmitted to RSUs as vehicles pass by. Like other VANET-based applications, security and privacy are two major concerns of drivers. In addition, volume/frequency of data to be transmitted to and stored at RSUs may be an issue. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving scheme for vehicle-RSU communications so that event data and driver identities can only be revealed by authorized personnel. We show that our idea is feasible, through simulations, in terms of transmission overhead due to extra security controls with different data uploading intervals.