Anonymity notions and techniques for public‐key infrastructures in vehicular networks

Abstract

AbstractAs vehicular networks approach deployment phases, there is wide recognition for challenges and pressing needs for solutions with respect to the areas of security, privacy, and performance. The requirement of participation in applications such as traffic safety, combined with the intrinsically ad hoc network environment, poses rather novel challenges to the modeling, design, and analysis of security solutions for vehicular networks. One particularly stringent requirement in this area is that of protecting the privacy of vehicle owners (i.e., their anonymity and their vehicle's location unlinkability) during their participation in a vehicular network such as in traffic safety applications. In this paper, we present novel models of concrete anonymity and unlinkability requirements for vehicular networks that can be built using state‐of‐the‐art options for communication network deployment (e.g., road‐side short‐range radio networks and hotspot networks). One key aspect of our modeling consists of recognizing the existence and impact of additional certification authorities managed by vehicle manufacturers. In particular, we consider a simple variant of a previously proposed public‐key infrastructure (PKI) for vehicular networks and present two techniques to augment it so that it provides improved anonymity and unlinkability properties. The resulting vehicular‐network key infrastructures satisfy desirable combinations of anonymity, unlinkability, bad actor detection, and performance requirements. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.