BECSI: Bandwidth efficient certificate status information distribution mechanism for VANETs

  • Authors:
  • Carlos Gaòán;Jose L. Muòoz;Oscar Esparza;Jonathan Loo;Jorge Mata-Díaz;Juanjo Alins

  • Affiliations:
  • Telematics Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Telematics Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Telematics Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Computer Communications Department, Middlesex University, London, UK;Telematics Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain;Telematics Department, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona, Spain

  • Venue:
  • Mobile Information Systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Certificate revocation is a challenging task, especially in mobile network environments such as vehicular ad Hoc networks VANETs. According to the IEEE 1609.2 security standard for VANETs, public key infrastructure PKI will provide this functionality by means of certificate revocation lists CRLs. When a certificate authority CA needs to revoke a certificate, it globally distributes CRLs. Transmitting these lists pose a problem as they require high update frequencies and a lot of bandwidth. In this article, we propose BECSI, a Bandwidth Efficient Certificate Status Information mechanism to efficiently distribute certificate status information CSI in VANETs. By means of Merkle hash trees MHT, BECSI allows to retrieve authenticated CSI not only from the infrastructure but also from vehicles acting as mobile repositories. Since these MHTs are significantly smaller than the CRLs, BECSI reduces the load on the CSI repositories and improves the response time for the vehicles. Additionally, BECSI improves the freshness of the CSI by combining the use of delta-CRLs with MHTs. Thus, vehicles that have cached the most current CRL can download delta-CRLs to have a complete list of revoked certificates. Once a vehicle has the whole list of revoked certificates, it can act as mobile repository.