Security Review: UW Parking Enforcement
The parking at the University of Washington has always been a deadly game of cat and mouse between driver and parking enforcement. There are limited parking resources on campus, and parking enforcement wants to make sure that they are maximizing their revenue for the spaces they have available. On the flip side, poor students/faculty are trying to get away with parking their cars/motorcycles free of charge.
There are a few assets that parking enforcement wants to protect. One is their revenue stream — making sure that they are receiving money for the parking that is available. Another is the availability of spaces, so that legitimate paying customers won’t be turned away at the door if the lots are oversold. In both cases, the adversary is the driver trying to cheat the system (aka, me).
One weakness of the system stems from having way more parking spots than there are parking enforcement officials. While this can work in an cheater’s favor in general, the longer one spends in the same spot, the more likely they are to be eventually ticketed. This might assume someone illegally parked would stay shorter — but then they have the added overhead of having to move their car frequently. One way that they can combat this is to deploy resources first towards the most high-traffic lots, and then check less frequently at satellite lots.
Another weakness of the system involves procedures for contesting tickets through the parking department. Any ticket can be contested through the office, and last checked, they had an average turnaround of 3-6 months, no doubt due to bureaucratic inefficiencies. If an adversary were to contest a ticket, they wouldn’t have to pay it for months, and would be likely to get it fined. One could also try sending in a longer letter to the department as to why they deserve to not get the ticket, in order to push it to the back of the queue for processing.
In the future, there might be an emphasis on more high-tech solutions (such as cameras) to quickly monitor parking lots and possibly detect cheaters. For the time being, however, there are some vulnerabilities in the parking system that allow attackers to get away with free campus parking undetected.