Public Key Infrastructure for Vehicle Networks

This chapter discusses public key infrastructure (PKI) for supporting consumer vehicle networks. It discusses functionality, architectures, protocols, and technical challenges for such vehicular PKIs. The chapter outlines technical challenges in designing vehicular PKIs that can preserve driver privacy and how to quantitatively measure privacy. A public key certificate is a digital object that binds a public key with the identity or type of the public key’s owner. Vehicles and other certificate users need to know which certificates have been revoked. A vehicular PKI system needs to support the following functions or operations: configure initial system-wide security parameters, assign initial certificates to vehicles and their communicating parties, acquire new certificates, distribute a vehicle’s certificates to other vehicles for them to use to verify signed messages, revoke misused certificates and distribute certificate revocation list (CRL) to vehicles and their communicating parties and detect certificate misuses and misbehaving vehicles. Controlled Vocabulary Terms message authentication; public key cryptography; vehicles