ANTARES - ANonymous Transfer of vehicle Access Rights from External cloud Services

As car sharing becomes an increasingly common task, mediating user access rights from external servers comes with threats regarding user’s privacy. Clearly, users can be tracked by service mediators, e.g., cloud providers, that manage vehicle fleets, etc. In this work we design and test a simple solution based on oblivious transfer, a well-known and secure cryptographic block, that allows to preserve user’s privacy when gaining access to the vehicle. We test the feasibility of deploying such a solution on Android capable smartphones but also account for potential in-vehicle components, e.g., car head units, that may be soon put to such tasks. We use Microsoft Azure as cloud service provider and deploy a Java implementation, based on the Bouncy Castle cryptographic library, on the server side. Our experimental results show that Android based units are capable of handling the required cryptographic operations and the implementation of the employed protocol can be done by existing open-source support.