Towards Deploying a Scalable & Robust Vehicular Identity and Credential Management Infrastructure

TL;DR

This paper presents an enhanced, fully implemented Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) that improves privacy, resilience, and scalability, supported by extensive evaluation demonstrating significant performance gains over prior systems.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, privacy-preserving VPKI system with improved security features and demonstrates its effectiveness through comprehensive implementation and performance evaluation.

Findings

Enhanced privacy protection against honest-but-curious entities

Significant performance improvements over previous VPKI systems

Successful standard-compliant implementation and extensive evaluation

Abstract

Several years of academic and industrial research efforts have converged to a common understanding on fundamental security building blocks for the upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. There is a growing consensus towards deploying a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) enables pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts in that direction. However, there are still significant technical issues that remain unresolved. Existing proposals for instantiating the VPKI either need additional detailed specifications or enhanced security and privacy features. Equally important, there is limited experimental work that establishes the VPKI efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we are concerned with exactly these issues. We leverage the common VPKI approach and contribute an enhanced system with precisely defined, novel features that improve its resilience and the user privacy protection. In particular, we depart from the common assumption that the VPKI entities are fully trusted and we improve user privacy in the face of an honest-but-curious security infrastructure. Moreover, we fully implement our VPKI, in a standard-compliant manner, and we perform an extensive evaluation. Along with stronger protection and richer functionality, our system achieves very significant performance improvement over prior systems - contributing the most advanced VPKI towards deployment.