Privacy-Preserving Public Key Infrastructure for Vehicular Networks

Cooperative intelligent transport systems promise considerable improvements on road safety and the utilization of transport infrastructures. Current approaches, however, build upon policies to protect privacy, which raise serious concerns. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving public key infrastructure (PKI) for vehicle-to-everything communication. We use zero-knowledge proofs to authenticate, while still being able to hide identities. In order to exclude malicious actors, we integrate an anonymous reputation-based blacklisting scheme. Our benchmarks on an on-board connectivity unit with resource-constrained hardware confirms the feasibility of the approach. Specifically, we expect approximately 67 kB payload and 35 minutes computation time per day to authenticate.