Biblio

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 (and 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. In this extended abstract, we leverage the state-of-the-art VPKI system and enhance its functionality towards a highly-available and dynamically-scalable design; this ensures that the system remains operational in the presence of benign failures or any resource depletion attack, and that it dynamically scales out, or possibly scales in, according to the requests' arrival rate. Our full-blown implementation on the Google Cloud Platform shows that deploying a VPKI for a large-scale scenario can be cost-effective, while efficiently issuing pseudonyms for the requesters.

Inter-vehicle communications disclose rich information about vehicle whereabouts. Pseudonymous authentication secures communication while enhancing user privacy thanks to a set of anonymized certificates, termed pseudonyms. Vehicles switch the pseudonyms (and the corresponding private key) frequently; we term this pseudonym transition process. However, exactly because vehicles can in principle change their pseudonyms asynchronously, an adversary that eavesdrops (pseudonymously) signed messages, could link pseudonyms based on the times of pseudonym transition processes. In this poster, we show how one can link pseudonyms of a given vehicle by simply looking at the timing information of pseudonym transition processes. We also propose "mix-zone everywhere": time-aligned pseudonyms are issued for all vehicles to facilitate synchronous pseudonym update; as a result, all vehicles update their pseudonyms simultaneously, thus achieving higher user privacy protection.