Implicit certificates support in IEEE 1609 security services for Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE)

In the near future, vehicles will exchange safety-critical information messages wirelessly with other vehicles on the road and with infrastructure. It is vital to provide secure mechanisms to validate the authenticity and integrity of these messages. The IEEE Standard 1609.2-2006 defines the format of secure messages and identifies security algorithms and mechanism for use in Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE). Due to the high mobility of vehicles, it is necessary to provide WAVE with low communication latencies and high speed data processing. Adding a security layer to WAVE will cause undesirable increases in the length of safety-critical message and in the time to process these messages. In this paper, we propose the use of implicit certificates in the IEEE Standard 1609.2 since the size of an implicit certificate is shorter than the size of an explicit certificate. We also propose two broadcast communication protocols that utilize implicit certificates for use in WAVE communication networks.