VPKIaaS: A Highly-Available and Dynamically-Scalable Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure

TL;DR

This paper presents VPKIaaS, a scalable and highly available Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure that ensures secure, privacy-preserving communication in large-scale vehicular networks by leveraging cloud infrastructure.

Contribution

It introduces a highly-available, dynamically-scalable VPKI system leveraging cloud technology, improving resilience and efficiency for large-scale vehicular communication environments.

Findings

System remains operational during benign failures

Efficient pseudonym issuance at large scale

Cost-effective deployment on cloud platforms

Abstract

The central building block of secure and privacy-preserving Vehicular Communication (VC) systems is a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), which provides vehicles with multiple anonymized credentials, termed pseudonyms. These pseudonyms are used to ensure message authenticity and integrity while preserving vehicle (and thus passenger) privacy. In the light of emerging large-scale multi-domain VC environments, the efficiency of the VPKI and, more broadly, its scalability are paramount. In this extended abstract, we leverage the state-of-the-art VPKI system and enhance its functionality towards a highly-available and dynamically-scalable design, this ensures that the system remains operational in the presence of benign failures or any resource depletion attack, and that it dynamically scales out, or possibly scales in, according to the requests' arrival rate. Our full-blown implementation on the Google Cloud Platform shows that deploying a VPKI for a large-scale scenario can be cost-effective, while efficiently issuing pseudonyms for the requesters.