Vehicle Authentication via Monolithically Certified Public Key and Attributes

Vehicular networks are used to coordinate actions among vehicles in traffic by the use of wireless transceivers (pairs of transmitters and receivers). Unfortunately, the wireless communication among vehicles is vulnerable to security threats that may lead to very serious safety hazards. In this work, we propose a viable solution for coping with Man-in-the-Middle attacks. Conventionally, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) is utilized for a secure communication with the pre-certified public key. However, a secure vehicle-to-vehicle communication requires additional means of verification in order to avoid impersonation attacks. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that proposes to certify both the public key and out-of-band sense-able static Accepted in Wireless Networks, June 2015. Partially supported by Rita Altura Trust Chair in Computer Sciences, Lynne and William Frankel Center for Computer Sciences, Israel Science Foundation (grant number 428/11). Partially supported by fundings from Polish National Science Center (decision number DEC-2013/09/B/ST6/02251). The work of Michael Segal has been supported by General Motors Corporation. Shlomi Dolev Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Tel.: +972-8-6472718 Fax: +972-8-6477650 E-mail: [email protected] Łukasz Krzywiecki Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland. Tel.: +48-71-320-3048 E-mail: [email protected] Nisha Panwar Department of Computer Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Tel.: +972-54-6542537 E-mail: [email protected] Michael Segal Department of Communication Systems Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel. Tel.: +972-8-6477234 Fax: +972-8-6472883 E-mail: [email protected] ar X iv :1 50 7. 04 49 1v 1 [ cs .C R ] 1 6 Ju l 2 01 5 2 Shlomi Dolev et al. attributes to enable mutual authentication of the communicating vehicles. Vehicle owners are bound to preprocess (periodically) a certificate for both a public key and a list of fixed unchangeable attributes of the vehicle. Furthermore, the proposed approach is shown to be adaptable with regards to the existing authentication protocols. We illustrate the security verification of the proposed protocol using a detailed proof in Spi calculus.