UK will witness a rise in connected autonomous vehicles soon. And, thus, it is important to work out privacy and security details of associated data. This has been the focal area of testing for WMG, University of Warwick. They tested 4 PETRAS project innovations recently.
The testing aims at ensuring smooth deployment of CAVs which can now connect with each other and roadside infrastructure. In fact, they can also connect roadside infrastructure with each other. WMG thus undertook a trial for the following 4 innovations in Internet of Things-based Transport and Mobility Demonstrator project. It is important to note here that Lloyd’s Register Foundation is funding the project.
Innovations:
Group Signatures: To ensure enhanced security, it is important for vehicles to provide digital signature. The identity claim helps in tracking vehicles. Group signature allows them to be a part of the larger group. So, there is more privacy than an individual signature. It can couple with timestamp. That way, even if an eavesdropper is around, he wouldn’t know if the same person sent the message twice.
Authentication Prioritization: It is expensive to verify identity of another vehicle. Thus, one can only verify a limited number of identities in message per second. Besides, on a particular motorway, there can be many vehicles sending messages. And, there can also be an adversary trying to prevent vehicles from verifying correct identities. Thus, it is important to assign priority to vehicles that are sender verified.
Decentralized PKI: To check identity, it is important to download public key from a server. But, the server is in cloud and due to extra hops, download time for key increases. Here, distributing the server over Edge infrastructure can solve the problem.
Decentralized PKI with Pseudonyms: Building on the above mentioned innovation, it supports issuing new identities to increase privacy. Together with the group signatures, it can prove helpful in a couple of scenarios.
