Dr Thanassis Giannetsos, Head of UBITECH’s Digital Security & Trusted Computing Research Group, and his co-authors present an extended comparative technical evaluation of PKI and DAA-Based Architectures for V2X Communication Security at the 2023 IEEE Vehicular Networking Conference (VNC) that is held from April 26-28, 2023, in Istanbul, Türkiye. In particular, as the emerging Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) landscape is expanding in terms of security and trust requirements, to provide the necessary enablers for the safety of critical operations (i.e., collision avoidance), Public Key Infrastructure (PKIs) and Direct Anonymous Attestation (DAA) schemes have been proposed by the literature, in order to provide authenticity over the exchanged messages. DAA schemes can help address several challenges of centralized PKIs by offering a more scalable solution for pseudonym certificate reloading and revocation.
Dr Thanassis Giannetsos and his co-authors are the first to provide a full implementation of a DAA-based solution for safeguarding the broadcast communication of messages in the V2X realm. They leverage previously published detailed protocol descriptions, and in what follows they focus more on demonstrating its feasibility and evaluating experimentally all core DAA features and functionalities, including certificate (pseudonym) revocation capabilities. At the same time, they put forth the first complete analysis between DAA-enabled and PKI-enabled security configurations. The findings throughout the experiments prove that their novel DAA-based architecture overcomes a series of shortcomings of the conventional centralized solutions in terms of scalability and computational footprint and suggest the need to move towards more integrated solutions converging concepts from both approaches, in order to better accommodate the needs of future C-ITS.
