Towards a secure and privacy-preserving multi-service vehicular architecture

Intensive efforts in industry, academia and standardization bodies have brought vehicular communications (VC) one step before commercial deployment. In fact, future vehicles will become significant mobile platforms, extending the digital life of individuals with an ecosystem of applications and services. To secure these services and to protect the privacy of individuals, it is necessary to revisit and extend the vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based approach towards a multi-service security architecture. This is exactly what this work does, providing a design and a proof-of-concept implementation. Our approach, inspired by long-standing standards, is instantiated for a specific service, the provision of short-term credentials (pseudonyms). Moreover, we elaborate on its operation across multiple VC system domains, and craft a roadmap for further developments and extensions that leverage Web-based approaches. Our current results already indicate our architecture is efficient and can scale, and thus can meet the needs of the foreseen broad gamut of applications and services, including the transportation and safety ones.