PlateGuard: License Plate Privacy Protection for Internet of Vehicles

The prevalence of affordable cameras and computing power has given rise to Automatic License Plate Reader (ALPR) systems that are able to easily collect and catalog license plate (LP) data from passing cars, providing a database of locations for drivers at specific times. These systems are often unsecured and little research has been done to provide a solution for protecting the privacy of citizens. This paper presents a system of encrypting the data gathered by these ALPR systems in a way that is easily implemented and able to reliably retrieve the encrypted data given legitimate cause. To improve the efficiency, reliability and scalability of the system, we design an edge based system to distribute the processing responsibilities of the system, considering that the main use cases require the system to service a large number of cameras in a city. The proposed system is evaluated using a set of metrics considered by the requirements of the system, with results indicating that the system can feasibly protect the privacy of anyone whose data is captured and retrieve specified LP data while maintaining secrecy on unspecified plates in the captured footage.