Designing a GDPR compliant blockchain-based IoV distributed information tracking system

Highlights

• We present an innovative management approach of traffic circulation information.

• The goal is sharing responsibilities and duties between interested stakeholders.

• We explore the effectiveness of blockchain as legal information source for traffic.

• Focus is on the support to legal enforceability of traffic related information.

• We target information and privacy about circulation in the Internet of Vehicles.

• We verify our solution by a GDPR-compliant Data Protection Impact Assessment.

• Several use cases impacting privacy are presented, with selected sequence diagrams.

Abstract

Blockchain technologies and distributed ledgers enable the design and implementation of trustable data logging systems that can be used by multiple parties to produce a non-repudiable database. The case of Internet of Vehicles may greatly benefit of such a possibility to track the chain of responsibility in case of accidents or damages due to bad or omitted maintenance, improving the safety of circulation and helping granting a correct handling of related legal issues. However, there are privacy issues that have to be considered, as tracked information potentially include data about private persons (position, personal habits), commercially relevant information (state of the fleet of a company, freight movement and related planning, logistic strategies), or even more critical knowledge (e.g., considering vehicles belonging to police, public authorities, governments or officers in sensible positions). In the European Union, all this information is covered by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

In this paper we propose a reference model for a system that manages relevant information to show how blockchain can support GDPR compliant solutions for Internet of Vehicles, taking as a reference an integrated scenario based on Italy, and analyze a subset of its use cases to show its viability with reference to privacy issues.

Introduction

Privacy issues and their regulation are a very timely and pressing topic in the European Union regulation debate. The introduction of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and of all national laws recognizing, implementing or developing it have sensibly influenced both the provisioning of technological services and the common feeling towards own personal data. When sensitive data (“special categories of personal data”, as defined in Article 9 of GDPR) generated by a plurality of subjects or connected to the interest of a plurality of subjects have to be collected, maintained and kept unaltered but inaccessible until legally authorized, current solutions, as in the case of Italy, are based on registries² owned and managed by public regulators with generally complex, anyway certified insertion or updating procedures. The regulator can manage this registry as a whole, if the frequency of operations can be actually handled, as a system of partial registries, articulating the distribution of operations on the basis of proper criteria (e.g., according to a well defined geographic partitioning), or acting as a top authority of a tree-organized delegated registries that are provided by third parties according to specific agreements and duties (e.g., the organization of the Italian Sistema Pubblico di Identità Digitale,³ or SPID, that allows online legal identification of persons by using tokens issued by third parties that can verify credentials, or Posta Elettronica Certificata,⁴ or PEC, that is a legally valid email system that ensures timestamping, delivery and identity of parties). However, these solutions represent a logical single point of failure, when non distributed, a cost (including technical, organizational and bureaucratic components), when maintained by public regulators, or a strong delegation choice, when involving commercial third parties that may be also providing other non-regulated services, potentially exposed to security breaches.

The application of Blockchain technology in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) domain offers a new solution to this kind of problems. The use of a blockchain, and of distributed ledgers, is changing the approach to registry maintenance by offering a number of advantages, first of all the complete distribution and replication, the fairness, the reliability, the openness, and the sharing of responsibilities. When registered data may be significant as proofs in situations in which blockchain users are in conflict of interest, the advantage is that each party (or a proxy of it) already has a copy of all data available, trustable and non-repudiable, that can be used to confirm the veracity of contained information even if not directly accessible. This opens the possibility of using blockchain-based solutions in privacy related applications, by exploiting a mechanism with digital signature with asymmetric key (e.g., the Italian firma digitale standard, as established by law with the Codice dell’Amministrazione Digitale⁵ and its modifications) that exploits the public signature of a regulator. A relevant application field is the tracking of all critical information in the automotive sector, including circulation. In this case, both kind of information, privacy-related and commercially relevant, are to be tracked and protected, and visible only for a court (e.g., in case of accidents or other legal infringements) or for one of the subjects (e.g., the anonymized diagnostic data might be accessible to the manufacturer for statistic reasons to possibly recall a batch of vehicles in case of problems). The rise of the Internet of Vehicles, that enables a large number of services ranging from vehicle-to-vehicle communication to autonomous drive and platooning, to the interaction with smart roads (Karpiriski, Senart, & Cahill, 2006), makes accessible the use of a blockchain for traffic monitoring, security and safety support and the solution of legal issues because of the native integration of sensing and computing on board and the possibility of capturing and cross compare the local state of the traffic. Moreover, the integration of production and maintenance information may be soon seamlessly available with the same technology, as literature reports the appearance of blockchains to support supply chain in manufacturing sectors like aerospace and automotive. The availability (with private, limited or shared visibility) of all relevant information may help stakeholders (insurances, manufacturers, garages, black box service providers, smart road concessionaires) in supporting their internal processes, in discharging or proving responsibilities in case of problems, in certifying operations and in disambiguating critical situations with a lower level of risk; reducing the need for unilateral preventive on-line data collection solutions makes sharing such a blockchain infrastructure viable and convenient (Campanile, Iacono, Levis, Marulli and Mastroianni, 2020). Moreover, a careful design of the data management and signature mechanism may also provide the possibility of implementing different levels of privacy, so to have non-personal but commercially significant data certified and accessible by the authorized party to produce additional information-driven services in the interest of the final users.

In this paper we propose a framework for the integration, collection, storage and management of information about circulating vehicles based on blockchain and Internet of Vehicles oriented to securing GDPR compliance and facilitating law enforcement and operations, to be applied on a national or international basis. We specially focus on privacy related issues, as they have a central role in the current regulations when dealing with data that can affect personal information, rather than on performances in this paper: consequently, evaluations and analyses are performed in the perspective of Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) risk analysis, following the procedures and using the tools that are compliant with the directives of the competent authorities. Our goal is to stimulate the interest of stakeholders and promote public initiatives around our concept, and raise the interest of researchers and practitioners about these topics. At the best of our knowledge, no other proposal with the same characteristics has been discussed in literature. After this introduction, Section 2 presents related work, Section 3 describes our proposal, Section 4 presents a conceptualization of the aspects of a possible blockchain for the architecture, Section 5 discusses GDPR compliance for sensitive parts and the related DPIA risk analysis (detailed in Appendix). Conclusions follow.