Zone Keys Trust Management in Vehicular Networks based on Blockchain

The future deployment of vehicular networks for road transportation (the so called Cooperative Intelligent Transport System (C-ITS) in Europe or Connected Vehicles program in USA) should be based on the secure exchange of messages among the vehicles and the infrastructure communication nodes. Deployment projects in various parts of the world are setting up Public Key Infrastructures (PKI) to support the security and privacy aspects on vehicular communications. While the use of PKI is a known technology to build a security framework for C-ITS and Connected Vehicles deployments and it will provide the basic needed services for integrity and authentication, research communities around the world are exploring extensions of these frameworks to implement specific functions like misbehavior detection and revocation. In addition, new techniques to mitigate privacy risks in vehicular networks are explored. In this paper, we address these aspects by proposing the use of blockchain in combination with a zone keys concept where the authorization certificates produced by the PKI are provided to the vehicles only if specific conditions stored in the blockchain are valid. We show how the concepts described in this paper can enhance the PKI-based frameworks through an efficient revocation mechanism, and mitigating privacy risks as well.