Autonomous Certification with List-Based Revocation for Secure V2V Communication

Privacy and authenticity are two essential security attributes of secure Vehicle-to-Vehicle communications. Pseudonymous Public Key Infrastructure (PPKI), an extension of standard PKI, has been proposed to achieve these security attributes. In Pseudonymous PKI, a user needs certificates or pseudonyms periodically from the Certificate Authority (CA) to authenticate messages anonymously. But the infrastructure presence to communicate with the CA may not be ubiquitous, at least in the initial development phases of vehicular communication. Another proposal, PKI+ reduces dependence on the CA by allowing users to generate pseudonyms autonomously. However, user revocation in PKI+ is rather inconvenient, since it requires the entire network of non-revoked users to be reconfigured after each such event. In this paper, we propose PKI++, an improvement over PKI+, which brings together the desirable features of PKI and PKI+, namely autonomous certification and list-based revocation. We compare the proposed algorithm with PKI and PKI+, and show revocation to be less costly in PKI++.