An Authorization Framework for Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems

Abstract

Cooperative Intelligent Transport Systems (C-ITS) aims to enhance the existing transportation infrastructure through the use of sensing capabilities and advanced communication technologies. While improving the safety, efficiency and comfort of driving, C-ITS introduces several security and privacy challenges. Among them, a main challenge is the protection of sensitive information and resources gathered and exchanged within C-ITS. Although several authorization frameworks have been proposed over the years, they are unsuitable to deal with the demands of C-ITS. In this paper, we present an authorization framework that addresses the challenges characterizing the C-ITS domain. Our framework leverages principles of both policy-based and token-based architectures to deal with the dynamicity of C-ITS while reducing the overhead introduced by the authorization process. We demonstrate our framework using typical use case scenarios from the C-ITS domain on location tracking.