Efficient Authorization Authority Certificate Distribution in VANETs

Sebastian Bittl, Karsten Roscher

2016

Abstract

Car-to-X communication systems are about to enter the mass market in upcoming years. Security in these networks depends on digital signatures managed by a multi-level certificate hierarchy. Thereby, certificate distribution is critical in regard to channel utilization and data reception delay via security caused packet loss. These issues are even more significant in case not only pseudonym certificates but also authorization authority certificates have to be exchanged between nodes in the VANET. Prior work has not studied distribution of the elements of a multi-level certificate chain in detail. Hence, this work provides an analysis of the currently standardized mechanisms and identifies several drawbacks of the straight forward solution proposed so far. Thereby, we find a severe denial of service attack on that solution. Moreover, the distribution problem is found to be similar to the packet forwarding problem encountered in position-based routing. Thus, we study several strategies for efficient distribution of a certificate chain in regard to channel load, which are adapted from their counterparts in position-based routing. Thereby, we find that by combining pseudonym certificate buffering with requester based responder selection the requirement for certificate chain distribution in VANETs can be removed completely. Hence, the proposed design avoids the identified denial of service weakness and reduces the worst case size of the security envelope of VANET messages by more than a third.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Bittl S. and Roscher K. (2016). Efficient Authorization Authority Certificate Distribution in VANETs . In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP, ISBN 978-989-758-167-0, pages 85-96. DOI: 10.5220/0005685600850096

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icissp16,
author={Sebastian Bittl and Karsten Roscher},
title={Efficient Authorization Authority Certificate Distribution in VANETs},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,},
year={2016},
pages={85-96},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0005685600850096},
isbn={978-989-758-167-0},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy - Volume 1: ICISSP,
TI - Efficient Authorization Authority Certificate Distribution in VANETs
SN - 978-989-758-167-0
AU - Bittl S.
AU - Roscher K.
PY - 2016
SP - 85
EP - 96
DO - 10.5220/0005685600850096