An interoperability system for authentication and authorisation in VANETs

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have evolved considerably over the last years, but despite the wide number of potential applications, VANETs also raise a broad range of critical security and privacy challenges. To achieve privacy, VANETs enforce the concepts of authentication and authorisation via public key infrastructures, relying on a large set of regional certification authorities with explicit cross-certification agreements to provide interoperability for vehicles and services. To avoid the burden of managing these cross-certificates, our research proposes the interoperability system (IS), an architecture to provide VANETs’ nodes with a security mechanism for mutually untrusted domains. The IS supplies vehicles with a trusted set of credentials by implementing a certificate status service and a security level evaluator. This paper shows that the proposed architecture can be used to implement a mandatory access control mechanism in two VANET scenarios with a protocol independent of the underlying communication system.