Mohammad Khodaei

VeSPA: vehicular security and privacy-preserving architecture

Vehicular Communications (VC) are reaching a near deployment phase and will play an important role in improving road safety, driving efficiency and comfort. The industry and the academia have reached a consensus for the need of a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), in order to achieve security, identity management, vehicle authentication, as well as preserve vehicle privacy. Moreover, a gamut of proprietary and safety applications, such as location-based services and pay-as-you-drive systems, are going to be offered to the vehicles. The emerging applications are posing new challenges for the existing Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (VPKI) architectures to support Authentication, Authorization and Accountability (AAA), without exposing vehicle privacy. In this work we present an implementation of a VPKI that is compatible with the VC standards. We propose the use of tickets as cryptographic tokens to provide AAA and also preserve vehicle privacy against adversaries and the VPKI. Finally, we present the efficiency results of our implementation to prove its applicability.

Towards deploying a scalable & robust vehicular identity and credential management infrastructure

Several years of academic and industrial research efforts have converged to a common understanding on fundamental security building blocks for the upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. There is a growing consensus towards deploying a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) enables pseudonymous authentication, with standardization efforts in that direction. However, there are still significant technical issues that remain unresolved. Existing proposals for instantiating the VPKI either need additional detailed specifications or enhanced security and privacy features. Equally important, there is limited experimental work that establishes the VPKI efficiency and scalability. In this paper, we are concerned with exactly these issues. We leverage the common VPKI approach and contribute an enhanced system with precisely defined, novel features that improve its resilience and the user privacy protection. In particular, we depart from the common assumption that the VPKI entities are fully trusted and we improve user privacy in the face of an honest-but-curious security infrastructure. Moreover, we fully implement our VPKI, in a standard-compliant manner, and we perform an extensive evaluation. Along with stronger protection and richer functionality, our system achieves very significant performance improvement over prior systems - contributing the most advanced VPKI towards deployment.

The Key to Intelligent Transportation: Identity and Credential Management in Vehicular Communication Systems

Vehicular communication (VC) systems will greatly enhance intelligent transportation systems. But their security and the protection of their users privacy are a prerequisite for deployment. Efforts in industry and academia brought forth a multitude of diverse proposals. These have now converged to a common view, notably on the design of a security infrastructure, a vehicular public-key infrastructure (VPKI) that shall enable secure conditionally anonymous VC. Standardization efforts and industry readiness to adopt this approach hint at its maturity. However, there are several open questions remaining, and it is paramount to have conclusive answers before deployment. In this article, we distill and critically survey the state of the art for identity and credential management in VC systems, and we sketch a road map for addressing a set of critical remaining security and privacy challenges.

Evaluating on-demand pseudonym acquisition policies in vehicular communication systems

Standardization and harmonization efforts have reached a consensus towards using a special-purpose Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI) in upcoming Vehicular Communication (VC) systems. However, there are still several technical challenges with no conclusive answers; one such an important yet open challenge is the acquisition of short-term credentials, pseudonym: how should each vehicle interact with the VPKI, e.g., how frequently and for how long? Should each vehicle itself determine the pseudonym lifetime? Answering these questions is far from trivial. Each choice can affect both the user privacy and the system performance and possibly, as a result, its security. In this paper, we make a novel systematic effort to address this multifaceted question. We craft three generally applicable policies and experimentally evaluate the VPKI system performance, leveraging two large-scale mobility datasets. We consider the most promising, in terms of efficiency, pseudonym acquisition policies; we find that within this class of policies, the most promising policy in terms of privacy protection can be supported with moderate overhead. Moreover, in all cases, this work is the first to provide tangible evidence that the state-of-the-art VPKI can serve sizable areas or domain with modest computing resources.

VPKIaaS: A Highly-Available and Dynamically-Scalable Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure

The central building block of secure and privacy-preserving Vehicular Communication (VC) systems is a Vehicular Public-Key Infrastructure (VPKI), which provides vehicles with multiple anonymized credentials, termed pseudonyms. These pseudonyms are used to ensure message authenticity and integrity while preserving vehicle (and thus passenger) privacy. In the light of emerging large-scale multi-domain VC environments, the efficiency of the VPKI and, more broadly, its scalability are paramount. In this extended abstract, we leverage the state-of-the-art VPKI system and enhance its functionality towards a highly-available and dynamically-scalable design; this ensures that the system remains operational in the presence of benign failures or any resource depletion attack, and that it dynamically scales out, or possibly scales in, according to the requests arrival rate. Our full-blown implementation on the Google Cloud Platform shows that deploying a VPKI for a large-scale scenario can be cost-effective, while efficiently issuing pseudonyms for the requesters.

Privacy Preservation through Uniformity

Inter-vehicle communications disclose rich information about vehicle whereabouts. Pseudonymous authentication secures communication while enhancing user privacy thanks to a set of anonymized certificates, termed pseudonyms. Vehicles switch the pseudonyms (and the corresponding private key) frequently; we term this pseudonym transition process. However, exactly because vehicles can in principle change their pseudonyms asynchronously, an adversary that eavesdrops (pseudonymously) signed messages, could link pseudonyms based on the times of pseudonym transition processes. In this poster, we show how one can link pseudonyms of a given vehicle by simply looking at the timing information of pseudonym transition processes. We also propose mix-zone everywhere: time-aligned pseudonyms are issued for all vehicles to facilitate synchronous pseudonym update; as a result, all vehicles update their pseudonyms simultaneously, thus achieving higher user privacy protection.

Efficient, Scalable, and Resilient Vehicle-Centric Certificate Revocation List Distribution in VANETs

In spite of progress in securing Vehicular Communication (VC) systems, there is no consensus on how to distribute Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs). The main challenges lie exactly in (i) crafting an efficient and timely distribution of CRLs for numerous anonymous credentials, pseudonyms, (ii) maintaining strong privacy for vehicles prior to revocation events, even with honest-but-curious system entities, (iii) and catering to computation and communication constraints of on-board units with intermittent connectivity to the infrastructure. Relying on peers to distribute the CRLs is a double-edged sword: abusive peers could pollute the process, thus degrading the timely CRLs distribution. In this paper, we propose a vehicle-centric solution that addresses all these challenges and thus closes a gap in the literature. Our scheme radically reduces CRL distribution overhead: each vehicle receives CRLs corresponding only to its region of operation and its actual trip duration. Moreover, a fingerprint of CRL pieces is attached to a subset of (verifiable) pseudonyms for fast CRL piece validation (while mitigating resource depletion attacks abusing the CRL distribution). Our experimental evaluation shows that our scheme is efficient, scalable, dependable, and practical: with no more than 25 KB/s of traffic load, the latest CRL can be delivered to 95% of the vehicles in a region (50x50 KM) within 15s, i.e., more than 40 times faster than the state-of-the-art. Overall, our scheme is a comprehensive solution that complements standards and can catalyze the deployment of secure and privacy-protecting VC systems.