Security Architecture for Vehicular Communications

Despite recent progress for vehicular communication in research, development, field tests, and standardization, security is still in an early phase though it represents a crucial part of the vehicular communication system. So far, no vehicular security architecture has been proposed which integrates existing individual solutions for vehicle registration, data integrity, authentication, and so on. By description of different architectural perspectives, we identify the stakeholders and their responsibilities. Then, we focus on the functional layer view and highlight the concepts which jointly secure the vehicular communication. Based on these concepts, we present an implementation approach which introduces the security concepts into the protocol stack of a vehicular communication system. The proposed security architecture follows a clean and modular design. It is the basis for our prototype implementation which will serve as a proof-of-concept. We will also submit this architecture to the ongoing standardization process of the Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC).