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

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.