Cybersecurity Vulnerabilities in Mobile Fare Payment Applications: A Case Study

Mobile fare payment applications are becoming increasingly common in the public transportation industry as a convenience for customers and as part of an effort to reduce fare management costs and improve operations for agencies. However, there is relatively little literature on vulnerabilities and liabilities in mobile fare payment applications. Furthermore, few public agencies or supporting vendors have policies or established processes in place to receive vulnerability reports or patch vulnerabilities discovered in their technologies. Given the rapidly increasing number of data breaches in general industry IT systems, as well as that mobile fare payment apps are a nexus between customer and agency financial information, the security of these mobile applications deserves further scrutiny. This paper presents a vulnerability discovered in a mobile fare payment application deployed at a transit agency in Florida that, because of the system architecture, may have affected customers in as many as 40 cities across the United States, an estimated 1,554,000 users. Lessons learned from the vulnerability disclosure process followed by the research team as well as recommendations for public agencies seeking to improve the security of these types of applications are also discussed.

Intelligent Bus Fare Management System using Naive Bayes Algorithm

In India, Buses are considered to be one of the cheapest mode of Public Transportation. Everyday thousands of people travel by bus to reach their offices, Amusement park, malls etc. The project has it’s use in providing an efficient transportation system in India. We are proposing such a system due to increase in traffic in recent days and to promote for public transportation among daily travellers. In this system, we are proposing QR reader for generating bus ticket. Users can scan QR code reader and make payment instead of taking tickets from conductor. Whenever a person decides to travel from one place to another, they have to select from and to location. It will then display all the buses moving in that particuar route. The user can then select the bus whichever suits him and then it will display amount details for per person and seat gets booked for the user. Then to generate the actual ticket, the users have to scan the QR code which is placed in the bus and make the required payment. After the successful payment, the conductor and traveller gets notified through SMS. Using this application, the user can also track the location of any bus with the help of GPS (Global Positioning System) and get to know the estimated arrival time(ETA) of a particular bus. The Application reduces passenger waiting time and make their travelling smooth and efficient. Also, we are using Naive bayes algorithm for classification of various attributes such as no of tickets booked every hour, no of person travelling in day, frequency of buses moving etc. Based on these attributes we can predict the probability of Buses required in a particular route, a single person travelling number of times in a day etc and help the public transport companies in increasing the usage while reducing the operational cost.