Scalable & Resilient Vehicle-Centric Certificate Revocation List Distribution in Vehicular Communication Systems

Abstract

In spite of progress in securing Vehicular Communication (VC) systems, there is no consensus on how to distribute Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs). The main challenges lie exactly in (i) crafting an efficient and timely distribution of CRLs for numerous anonymous credentials, pseudonyms, (ii) maintaining strong privacy for vehicles prior to revocation events, even with honest-but-curious system entities, (iii) and catering to computation and communication constraints of on-board units with intermittent connectivity to the infrastructure. Relying on peers to distribute the CRLs is a double-edged sword: abusive peers could "pollute" the process, thus degrading the timely CRLs distribution. In this paper, we propose a vehicle-centric solution that addresses all these challenges and thus closes a gap in the literature. Our scheme radically reduces CRL distribution overhead: each vehicle receives CRLs corresponding only to its region of operation and its actual trip duration. Moreover, a "fingerprint" of CRL 'pieces' is attached to a subset of (verifiable) pseudonyms for fast CRL 'piece' validation (while mitigating resource depletion attacks abusing the CRL distribution). Our experimental evaluation shows that our scheme is efficient, scalable, dependable, and practical: with no more than 25 KB/s of traffic load, the latest CRL can be delivered to 95% of the vehicles in a region (15×15 KM) within 15s, i.e., more than 40 times faster than the state-of-the-art. Overall, our scheme is a comprehensive solution that complements standards and can catalyze the deployment of secure and privacy-protecting VC systems.

A Survey of Security and Privacy Issues in V2X Communication Systems

“…Previous research has been conducted on the subject of CRL distribution in V2X context proposing various schemes to make it efficient. Some of these schemes include: 1) splitting CRL in small pieces [81,102], 2) distribution through RSU [106], 3) CRL dissemination in epidemic fashion [86], 4) use of Bloom Filter to reduce the CRL size [116]. Although these works include novel approaches to increase efficiency of CRL distribution, they do not address the relevance aspect we discussed.…”

Toward Collaborative Intelligence in IoV Systems: Recent Advances and Open Issues

“…In view of the above safety requirements, researchers have carried out many related studies recently. To solve the problems of vehicle identity privacy, distribution of certificate revocation Lists, and computing and communication constraints of vehicular devices intermittently connected to infrastructure, Khodaei et al [58] designed certificate-based batch authentication technology. However, the fast data communication between vehicles in such schemes and RSUs requires cumbersome certificates, and has a high key storage burden and a long operation time.…”

HERMES: Scalable, Secure, and Privacy-Enhancing Vehicular Sharing-Access System

“…Beyond vehicle sharing security and privacy, vehicular communications security and privacy received extensive attention over the years [46], [87], [88]. Recent results focus, for example, on scalable systems, notably for credential management [46], [89], [90], pseudonymous certificates for vehicle tracking protection [91], and decentralized cooperative defenses [92], [93]. Moreover, Qi et al [94] proposed an enhanced scheme of [95], namely, DUBI, a decentralized and privacy-preserving usage-based insurance scheme built on the blockchain technology to address privacy concerns for pay-asyou-drive insurances using zero-knowledge proofs and smart contracts.…”