Lightweight and Anonymity-preserving Secure Group Communication Mechanism for Cooperative Driving

Abstract

Platooning is gaining much attention due to its potential for improving road safety, and increasing vehicular throughput. Given the required fine-grained coordination among the involved vehicles, resilience to cyberattacks is very crucial. Moreover, the information sharing among the vehicles should not be at the expense of the user's privacy. Additionally, the platoon operation is based on broadcast and requires a lightweight method to support secure group communication. This paper presents a novel protocol that utilizes lightweight hardware fingerprinting primitives and the Chinese Remainder Theorem (CRT) to automate the key generation and management process. Our protocol eliminates the need for pre-loaded keys and enables vehicles to infer the group key on-the-fly. CRT is utilized to help the transportation authority generate a group key for each platoon and broadcast an obscured version of such a key. Using our scheme, only the vehicles involved in platoon can recover the key using their respective hardware primitives. The validation results confirm the resilience of our protocol to attempts for unveiling the keys by single and collusive actors, while also providing reduced computational complexity compared to competing schemes.