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Mutual influence of certificate distribution and pseudonym change strategies in vehicular ad-hoc networks

2017 , Bittl, Sebastian , Roscher, Karsten

Vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) are subject to high interest from both the automotive industry as well as government bodies owing to their prospect of increasing safety of driving. Wireless data exchange within VANETs requires rigid security mechanisms to enable its usage in safety critical driver assistance systems. Requirements include not only authenticity and integrity of messages, but also privacy of drivers. We find that much research has been conducted on certificate dissemination and on privacy enhancing certificate (i.e., pseudonym) change. However, mutual influence of techniques from both domains has not been studied in prior work. Hence, we provide an analysis of such cross influence. We show that certificate change massively increases channel load under currently standardised certificate distribution mechanisms. Thus, we propose to use explicit signalling of certificate changes among nodes to limit the found overhead. The conducted evaluation shows that this approach overcomes the identified problems.

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Efficient authorization authority certificate distribution in VANETs

2016 , Bittl, Sebastian , Roscher, Karsten

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-levelcertificate 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 lad, 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.

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Publication

Efficient rate-adaptive certificate distribution in VANETs

2015 , Bittl, Sebastian , Aydinli, Berke , Roscher, Karsten

Car-to-X communication systems, often called vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs), are in the process of entering the mass market in upcoming years. Thereby, security is a corepoint of concern due to the intended use for safety critical driver assistance systems. However, currently suggested security mechanisms introduce significant overhead into Car-to-X systems in terms of channel load and delay. Especially, the usage of on the fly distributed pseudonym certificates leads to a trade off between channel load and authentication delay, which may lead to significant packet loss. Thus, this work studies a novel concept for pseudonym certificate distribution in VANETs using rate-adaptive certificate distribution based on monitoring a vehicle's environment. Thereby, the cyclic certificate emission frequency is adapted on the fly based on cooperative awareness metrics for discrete parts of the vehicle's surrounding. The obtained mechanism is evaluated in a highway as well as an urban simulation scenario to show its suitability for a broad range of traffic conditions. Thereby, we find that it is able to significantly outperform the currently standardized approach for pseudonym certificate distribution in VANETs based on ETSI ITS standards. Thus, it should be regarded for further development of future VANETs.