SecSPS: A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Framework for Smart Parking Systems

Smart parking systems are a crucial component of the “smart city” concept, especially in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT). They aim to take the stress out of finding a vacant parking spot in city centers, due to the increasing number of cars, especially during peak hours. To realize the concept of smart parking, IoT-enabling technologies must be utilized, as the traditional way of developing smart parking solutions entails a lack of scalability, compatibility with IoT-constrained devices, security, and privacy awareness. In this paper, we propose a secure and privacy-preserving framework for smart parking systems. The framework relies on the publish/subscribe communication model for exchanging a huge volume of data with a large number of clients. On one hand, it provides functional services, including parking vacancy detection, real-time information for drivers about parking availability, driver guidance, and parking reservation. On the other hand, it provides security approaches on both the network and application layers. In addition, it supports mutual authentication mechanisms between entities to ensure device/ data authenticity, and provide security protection for users. That makes our proposed framework resilient to various types of security attacks, such as replay, phishing, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Finally, we analyze the performance of our framework, which is suitable for IoT devices, in terms of computation and network overhead.