Title: An interoperability system for authentication and authorisation in VANETs

Authors: Valentina Casola, Jesus Luna, Antonino Mazzeo, Manel Medina, Massimiliano Rak, Jetzabel Serna

Addresses: Dipartimento di Inoformatica e Sistemistica, Universita degli studi di Napoli Fedrico II, Napoli, Italy. ' Barcelona Digital Centre Technologic, Barcelona, Spain. ' Dipartimento di Inoformatica e Sistemistica, Universita degli studi di Napoli Fedrico II, Napoli, Italy. ' Department of Computer Architecture, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain. ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell'Informazione, Seconda Universita di Napoli, Aversa, Italy. ' Department of Computer Architecture, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

Abstract: Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have evolved considerably over the last years, but despite the wide number of potential applications, VANETs also raise a broad range of critical security and privacy challenges. To achieve privacy, VANETs enforce the concepts of authentication and authorisation via public key infrastructures, relying on a large set of regional certification authorities with explicit cross-certification agreements to provide interoperability for vehicles and services. To avoid the burden of managing these cross-certificates, our research proposes the interoperability system (IS), an architecture to provide VANETs| nodes with a security mechanism for mutually untrusted domains. The IS supplies vehicles with a trusted set of credentials by implementing a certificate status service and a security level evaluator. This paper shows that the proposed architecture can be used to implement a mandatory access control mechanism in two VANET scenarios with a protocol independent of the underlying communication system.

Keywords: authentication; authorisation; interoperability; security; VANETs; vehicular ad hoc networks; vehicular networks; access control mechanisms.

DOI: 10.1504/IJAACS.2010.031087

International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems, 2010 Vol.3 No.2, pp.115 - 135

Published online: 20 Jan 2010 *

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