An electronic and secure automatic fare collection system with revocable anonymity for users

Abstract

Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) systems calculate the fare that the user must pay which depends on the points of entrance and exit of the system. These systems were paperbased, but the progressive introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) allows the use of electronic tickets which helps to reduce costs and it improves the control of the infrastructures. Nevertheless, these systems must be secure against possible fraud, and they must also preserve users' privacy. We propose an AFC system that offers strong privacy for honest users. The service provider can not disclose the identity of its users and, moreover, different journeys of the same user are unlinkable. However, anonymity for users could be revoked if they misbehave. This system has been designed in order to use personal mobile devices.

Privacy-Preserving Electronic Ticket Scheme with Attribute-Based Credentials

“…Nakanishi et al [28] proposed an electronic coupon (e-coupon) scheme where the group signature scheme [29] was used to provide anonymity and unlinkability. Vives-Guasch [30] proposed an automatic fare collection (AFC) system in which the group signature scheme proposed by Boneh et al [31] was used to provide unlinkability and revocable anonymity. These schemes can implement anonymity, de-anonymity, ticket unlinkability and ticket untransferability, but, unlike our scheme, they do not support privacy-preserving attribute-based ticketing.…”

A Secure Automatic Fare Collection System for Time-Based or Distance-Based Services with Revocable Anonymity for Users

“…In our previous work [7], we proposed an automatic fare collection system for distance-based systems, where users were not able to change the direction of the movement without exiting the service, i.e., they must check out according to their direction. This required to put system exits separated by direction.…”

“…Next, a requirements' study of the security for time-based and distance-based protocols is conducted in Section 4. Note that [7] does not include the requirements for the above extensions. The time-based protocol is described in Section 5 and the distance-based in Section 6.…”