Efficient Certificate Revocation in Vehicular Networks Using NGN Capabilities

We address the problem of efficiently revoking certificates of malicious and compromised nodes in vehicular networks. As in previous work, our focus is making sure that vehicles receive the new list of revoked certificates (CRL) before they can be compromised. Unlike previous solutions, our work revolves around the idea of making use of existing capabilities offered by mobile network operators to improve the efficiency of the distribution of the CRL. Our proposed solution gathers positions and headings of vehicles using a location service enabler. Based on that information, the infrastructure can decide when and in which areas to broadcast the incremental CRL using any of the existing technologies such as the Multimedia Broadcast Multicast Service (MBMS). Our simulation results show that the proposed solution outperforms existing solutions based on the use of Road-side Units (RSUs) for disseminating CRLs. The improvement in terms of distribution delay and number of compromised nodes is noticeably better as the density of vehicles decreases.