Secure Public Key Regime (SPKR) in vehicular networks

Public Key Regime (PKR) was proposed as an alternative to certificate based PKI in securing Vehicular Networks (VNs). It eliminates the need for vehicles to append their certificate for verification because the Road Side Units (RSUs) serve as Delegated Trusted Authorities (DTAs) to issue up-to-date public keys to vehicles for communications. If a vehicle´s private/public key needs to be revoked, the root TA performs real time updates and disseminates the changes to these RSUs in the network. Therefore, PKR does not need to maintain a huge Certificate Revocation List (CRL), avoids complex certificate verification process and minimizes the high latency. However, the PKR scheme is vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) and collusion attacks. In this paper, we study these attacks and propose a pre-authentication mechanism to secure the PKR scheme. Our new scheme is called the Secure Public Key Regime (SPKR). It is based on the Schnorr signature scheme that requires vehicles to expend some amount of CPU resources before RSUs issue the requested public keys to them. This helps to alleviate the risk of DoS attacks. Furthermore, our scheme is secure against collusion attacks. Through numerical analysis, we show that SPKR has a lower authentication delay compared with the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDSA) scheme and other ECDSA based counterparts.