Short-Lived, Unlinked Certificates for Privacy-Preserving Secure Vehicular Communications

Short-lived, unlinked certificates are introduced to provide secure and privacy-preserving communications in vehicle networks. A short-lived certificate has a short expiration period on the order of weeks, days, or even shorter time durations, and uniquely belongs to one vehicle. Each vehicle has a large number of short-lived certificates. It randomly selects a certificate to use on a “just-in-time” basis to sign or encrypt outgoing messages. Short-lived certificates are unlinked to the vehicle in that no single entity in the network will have sufficient information to determine which vehicle owns which certificate or which set of certificates belong to the same vehicle. These properties make it infeasible for the attacker to uncover vehicle identities by promiscuously collecting and linking certificates. Because each certificate uniquely belongs to a single vehicle, only one vehicle is affected if a certificate is compromised. Finally, short-lived certificates eliminate the need for certificate revocation lists (CRLs), whose size and timely distribution present a difficult challenge in any Public-Key Infrastructure (PKI) system. In this paper, the authors discuss the goals and design principles of short-lived, unlinked certificates. They present a new certificate authority (CA) architecture and its enabling transaction flows for managing short-lived, unlinked digital certificates throughout their lifecycles in vehicle networks. Specifically, the presented architecture partitions the traditional CA functions into authorizing CA and assigning CA. This allows the timely and precise identification of the compromised vehicle from a misused certificate while protecting vehicle identifies even when the assigning CA is compromised.

• Corporate Authors:

  ITS Japan

  Tokyo,   Japan 

  ITS America

  1100 17th Street, NW, 12th Floor
  Washington, DC  United States  20036

  ERTICO

  326 Avenue Louis
  Brussels,   Belgium  B-1050
• Authors:
  • Pietrowicz, Stan
  • Zhang, Tao
  • Shim, Hyong
• Conference:
  • 17th ITS World Congress
  • Location: Busan , Korea, South
  • Date: 2010-10-25 to 2010-10-29
• Publication Date: 2010

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: DVD
• Features: Figures; References;
• Pagination: 12p
• Monograph Title: 17th ITS World Congress, Busan, 2010: Proceedings

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Digital communication systems; Information processing; Privacy; Security; Vehicle to infrastructure communications; Vehicle to vehicle communications; Vehicular ad hoc networks; Wireless communication systems
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Security and Emergencies; I90: Vehicles;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01345263
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Jul 21 2011 10:07AM