Hongyu Jin

Hongyu Jin, Mohammad Khodaei, Panos Papadimitratos

We surveyed and presented the state-of-the-art VC systems, security and privacy architectures and technologies, emphasizing on security and privacy challenges and their solutions for P2P interactions in VSNs towards standardization and deployment. We note that beyond safety applications that have drawn a lot of attention in VC systems, there is significant and rising interest in vehicle-to-vehicle interaction for a range of transportation efficiency and infotainment applications, notably LBS as well as a gamut of services by mobile providers. While this enriches the VC systems and the user experience, security and privacy concerns are also intensified. This is especially so, considering (i) the privacy risk from the exposure of the users to the service providers, and (ii) the security risk from the interaction with malicious or selfish and thus misbehaving users or infrastructure. We showed existing solutions can in fact evolve and address the VSN-specific challenges, and improve or even accelerate the adoption of VSN applications.

Mohammad Khodaei, Hongyu Jin, Panos Papadimitratos

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 special-purpose identity and credential management infrastructure, i.e., a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), enabling pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts towards that direction. In spite of the progress made by standardization bodies (IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI) and harmonization efforts (Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC)), significant questions remain unanswered towards deploying a VPKI. Deep understanding of the VPKI, a central building block of secure and privacy-preserving VC systems, is still lacking. This paper contributes to the closing of this gap. We present SECMACE, a VPKI system, which is compatible with the IEEE 1609.2 and ETSI standards specifications. We provide a detailed description of our state-of-the-art VPKI that improves upon existing proposals in terms of security and privacy protection, and efficiency. SECMACE facilitates multi-domain operations in the VC systems and enhances user privacy, notably preventing linking pseudonyms based on timing information and offering increased protection even against honest-but-curious VPKI entities. We propose multiple policies for the vehicle-VPKI interactions, based on which and two large-scale mobility trace datasets, we evaluate the full-blown implementation of SECMACE. With very little attention on the VPKI performance thus far, our results reveal that modest computing resources can support a large area of vehicles with very low delays and the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead.