Abstract

Abstract-Numerous technologies have been deployed to assist and manage transportation over the years. But recent concerted efforts in academia and industry point to a paradigm shift in intelligent transportation systems. Vehicles will carry computing and communication platforms and will have enhanced sensing capabilities. They will enable new versatile systems that enhance transportation safety and efficiency and will provide infotainment. This paper surveys the state-of-theart approaches, solutions, and technologies across a broad range of projects for vehicular communication systems.

Effective and robust operations, as well as security and privacy are critical for the deployment of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Efficient and easy-to-manage security and privacy-enhancing mechanisms are essential for the wide-spread adoption of the VANET technology. In this paper, we are concerned with this problem; and in particular, how to achieve efficient and robust pseudonym-based authentication. We design mechanisms that reduce the security overhead for safety beaconing, and retain robustness for transportation safety, even in adverse network settings. Moreover, we show how to enhance the availability and usability of privacy-enhancing VANET mechanisms: Our proposal enables vehicle on-board units to generate their own pseudonyms, without affecting the system security.

Significant developments took place over the past few years in the area of vehicular communication (VC) systems. Now, it is well-understood in the community that security and protection of private user information are a prerequisite for the deployment of the technology. This is so exactly because the benefits of VC systems, with the mission to enhance transportation safety and efficiency, are at stake. Without the integration of strong and practical security and privacy enhancing mechanisms, VC systems could be disrupted or disabled even by relatively unsophisticated attackers. We address this problem within the SeVeCom project, having developed a security architecture that provides a comprehensive and practical solution. We present our results in a set of two papers in this issue. In this first one, we analyze threats and types of adversaries, we identify security and privacy requirements, and present a spectrum of mechanisms to secure VC systems. We provide a solution that can be quickly adopted and deployed. Our progress towards implementation of our architecture, along with results on the performance of the secure VC system, are presented in the second paper. We conclude with an investigation, based on current results, of upcoming elements to be integrated in our secure VC architecture.