Scaling Pseudonymous Authentication for Large Mobile Systems
This work addresses scalability and security issues in VC systems, which is critical for enabling secure and privacy-preserving communication in emerging large-scale multi-domain environments, representing an incremental improvement over existing VPKI systems.
The paper tackles the challenge of scaling pseudonymous authentication for large mobile systems, specifically in Vehicular Communication (VC) environments, by enhancing a state-of-the-art Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) to achieve high availability, dynamic scalability, and resilience against failures and attacks, with a full implementation on Google Cloud Platform demonstrating cost-effectiveness.
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 (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. By the same token, preventing misuse of the credentials, in particular, Sybil-based misbehavior, and managing "honest-but-curious" insiders are other facets of a challenging problem. In this paper, we leverage a state-of-the-art VPKI system and enhance its functionality towards a highly-available, dynamically-scalable, and resilient design; this ensures that the system remains operational in the presence of benign failures or resource depletion attacks, and that it dynamically scales out, or possibly scales in, according to request arrival rates. Our full-blown implementation on the Google Cloud Platform shows that deploying large-scale and efficient VPKI can be cost-effective.