Privacy Friendly E-Ticketing For Public Transport

TL;DR

This paper proposes privacy-preserving protocols for public transport ticketing using smartphones, aiming to replace invasive systems with secure, user-friendly solutions that emulate traditional tickets and pay-as-you-go models.

Contribution

It introduces two novel privacy-friendly ticketing protocols inspired by existing systems, focusing on practical implementation and failure handling using smartphones.

Findings

Protocols emulate paper tickets and pay-as-you-go systems.

Focus on privacy preservation in practical public transport settings.

Addresses failure management in privacy-friendly ticketing.

Abstract

This paper studies how to implement a privacy friendly form of ticketing for public transport in practice. The protocols described are inspired by current (privacy invasive) public transport ticketing systems used around the world. The first protocol emulates paper based tickets. The second protocol implements a pay-as-you-go approach, with fares determined when users check-in and check-out. Both protocols assume the use of a smart phone as the main user device to store tickets or travel credit. We see this research as a step towards investigating how to design commonly used infrastructure in a privacy friendly manner in practice, paying particular attention to how to deal with failures.