Certificate Assignment Strategies for a PKI-based Security Architecture in a Vehicular Network

This paper proposes novel certificate assignment strategies for use in vehicular networks in order to significantly reduce the complexity of managing the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) framework. The strategy involves segmenting a country into a number of geographic regions, and the assignment of region-specific certificates to an OBU resident on a vehicle. A vehicle is also assigned multiple certificates corresponding to several regions in its vicinity as advance preparation for migration into nearby regions. Segmentation based on geographic regions is shown to significantly reduce the size of Certificate Revocation Lists (CRLs). Next, a scalable design for the back-end Certifying Authority (CA) with region-based certificates is presented. The paper concludes with a simple analysis of the performance of the proposed strategies.