The basis for many VANET applications are periodic beacons carrying information like location, heading and speed. In order to secure beaconing, messages should be signed and carry a certificate to attest valid network participants. In order to reduce the significant communication and computational overhead created by this, the authors propose to skip signatures or certificates in certain situations. Looking at recent standardization efforts and fields tests it becomes clear that beaconing will initially be a cornerstone for upcoming C2X eSafety applications. With beaconing the authors denote the periodic transmission of packets containing a vehicle's position and other information as a (single-hop) link-layer broadcast to all neighbouring vehicles or roadside units. Implemented in an insecure way, beaconing opens opportunities for abuse. To address these problems, many security solutions suggest to use signatures based on asymmetric cryptographic mechanisms like ECDSA together with more mechanisms. The basic strategy is to equip vehicles with asymmetric cryptographic key pairs (VK SK) and certificates (Cert) issued by a trusted certification authority (CA). Then all beacons get signed using the vehicle's signature key SK and receivers verify them using the verification key VK. Signature and certificate containing VK are attached to the beacon.
Secure and efficient beaconing for vehicular networks
Sichere und wirksame Definition von fahrzeugspezifischen Netzen
2008
2 Seiten, 1 Bild, 3 Quellen
Conference paper
English