The Key to Intelligent Transportation: Identity and Credential Management in Vehicular Communication Systems

Abstract

Vehicular Communication (VC) systems will greatly enhance intelligent transportation systems. But their security and the protection of their users' privacy are a prerequisite for deployment. Efforts in industry and academia brought forth a multitude of diverse proposals. These have now converged to a common view, notably on the design of a security infrastructure, a Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (VPKI) that shall enable secure conditionally anonymous VC. Standardization efforts and industry readiness to adopt this approach hint to its maturity. However, there are several open questions remaining, and it is paramount to have conclusive answers before deployment. In this article, we distill and critically survey the state of the art for identity and credential management in VC systems, and we sketch a roadmap for addressing a set of critical remaining security and privacy challenges.

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

“…We assume that each vehicle is registered only with its Home-LTCA (H-LTCA), the policy decision and enforcement point, reachable by the registered vehicles. Without loss of generality, a domain can be defined as a set of vehicles in a region, registered with the H-LTCA, subject to the same administrative regulations and policies [50]. There can be several PCAs, each active in one or more domains.…”

Scaling pseudonymous authentication for large mobile systems

“…We assume that each vehicle is registered only with its Home-LTCA (H-LTCA), the policy decision and enforcement point, reachable by the registered vehicles. Without loss of generality, a domain can be defined as a set of vehicles in a region, registered with the H-LTCA, subject to the same administrative regulations and policies [61,70]. There can be several PCAs, each active in one or more domains; any legitimate, i.e., registered, vehicle is able to obtain pseudonyms from any PCA, the pseudonym provider (as long as there is a trust established between the two CAs).…”

Security and Privacy in Vehicular Social Networks

“…Sybil resilience in VSNs remains an open challenge in the absence of consensus because the standardization bodies [16], [30] and harmonization efforts do not have conclusive views on that front. For example, Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC) [10] proposes to issue pseudonyms with overlapping lifetimes in order to keep the safety applications operational at any given point in time [34], while [44], [33] (works in the context of SeVeCom [35] and PRESERVE EU project [50] respectively) proposes to issue pseudonyms with non-overlapping lifetimes in order to eliminate the possibility of equipping a vehicle with multiple simultaneously valid short-term identities. However, beyond enforcing this constraint within a domain, malicious users could exploit the existence of multiple domains [1], [26], [18] to obtain simultaneously valid pseudonyms from different domains, depending on the pseudonym usage policies.…”

“…Facilitating cross domain operations is one of the main operational challenges in VC systems [34]. Similar to VC systems, trust establishment has to be taken into consideration before deploying a secure and privacy-preserving multidomain VSN.…”