Design and Implementation of Certificate Revocation List Acquisition Method for Security of Vehicular Communications

Abstract

Distributing a Certificate Revocation List (CRL) quickly to all vehicles in the system requires a very large number of road side units (RSUs) to be deployed. In reality, initial deployment stage of vehicle networks would be characterized by limited infrastructure as a result in very limited vehicle to infrastructure communication. However, every vehicle wants the most recent CRLs to protect itself from malicious users and malfunctioning equipments, as well as to increase the overall security of the vehicle networks. To address this challenge, we design and implement a nomadic device based CRL acquisition method using nomadic device’s communication capability with cellular networks. When a vehicle could not directly communicate with nearby RSUs, the nomadic device acts as a security mediator to perform vehicle’s security functions continuously through cellular networks. Therefore, even if RSUs are not deployed or sparsely deployed, vehicle’s security threats could be minimized by receiving the most recent CRLs in a reasonable time.