Abstract-We present AutoCore, an automated crash reporting application that uses VANETs (Vehicular Ad hoc NETworks) to provide authenticated digital video and telemetry data. This data is recorded by vehicles either involved in or at the scene of a crash and can be used by investigators to reconstruct the events that lead up to the crash. To secure this application, we present a security infrastructure that extends the state of the art in VANET security. In particular, the contributions of this infrastructure include (a) the concept of Road-worthiness Certificates, (b) use of these certificates in a practical scheme for the distribution of cryptographic vehicle credentials issued by regional transportation authorities, (c) a decentralized scheme for conditionally anonymous, inter-vehicle communication, (d) efficient support for the roaming of vehicles between different transportation authority jurisdictions and (e) an evaluation of our security infrastructure using AutoCore. Eyewitness accounts of an automotive accident are often inaccurate or conflicting. To mitigate this problem, we propose AutoCore, a VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork) application that automatically records video and telemetry data in a crash for use during an investigation. If investigators were provided with such data and could be assured of its authenticity, there would be less need to depend on eyewitness accounts. AutoCore could also help determine liability in hit-and-run incidents. An automated collision reporting application presents an interesting set of research challenges, including maintaining vehicle location and identity privacy, providing conditional anonymity for vehicles reporting collisions, protecting the system against various attacks and ensuring the authenticity of the reported data. Previous work that addresses VANET security and privacy has focused on identifying threats [15] , [18] , trusted intervehicle communication [9] and on the design of a security framework for VANETs [7] , [11], [17]. Several challenges, however, remain open: First, the task of distributing the cryptographic credentials used by vehicles to sign and authenticate outgoing messages has been largely ignored. Second, proposed key management schemes require a centralized database for the conditional anonymity of vehicles [17] , introducing a single point of failure. Third, a concrete example of how these proposed techniques could be applied to protect a particular VANET application has been missing. Contributions -Our contributions are (a) the AutoCore crash reporting application and a detailed analysis of the threats against it, (b) a security infrastructure to protect AutoCore that uses a decentralized scheme to provide conditionally anonymous inter-vehicle communication, (c) the concept of cryptographically-verifiable Road-worthiness Certificates issued to vehicles by authorized vehicle service centers, (d) the use of these certificates in a practical scheme for the distribution of cryptographic vehicle credentials issued by regional authorities via roadside access points, (e) efficient support for the roaming of vehicles between different regions and (f) a detailed security and cost analysis of our infrastructure. Because our focus is on security and privacy, a detailed description of AutoCore is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, we provide a brief overview of the system in section III, after reviewing the state of the art in section II. Section IV analyzes our threat model, section V introduces our security infrastructure and section VI describes how we use this security infrastructure to protect AutoCore. Section VII analyzes our security infrastructure and section VIII discusses implementation issues. We review related work in section IX and briefly discuss some directions for future work when concluding in section X. Automakers are working on pushing the safety envelope with proactive safety systems. These next-generation safety systems require vehicles to form cooperative groups, allowing them to exchange information and build awareness of their environments [8] , [4] , [23] . VANETs are thus a logical foundation for such safety systems. To date, most industrial and academic research efforts in vehicular safety communications over VANETs have focused on the design of suitable MAC protocols, with the most prominent initiative being WAVE (Wireless Access for the Vehicular Environment, often also referred to as DSRC or Dedicated Short Range Communications). Designed as a shortto-medium range wireless protocol, WAVE provides data rates of up to 27Mbps over a range of 1000m and has been standardized as 802.11p [12] . In the US, the FCC has allocated radio spectrum for WAVE at the 5.9GHz band, with regulatory bodies in the EU and Japan pursuing similar initiatives. Examples
REF introduced the concept of cryptographically-verifiable road-worthiness certificates for secure crash reporting.
Secure crash reporting in vehicular Ad hoc networks
2007 Third International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communications Networks and the Workshops - SecureComm 2007
2007 Third International Conference on Security and Privacy in Communications Networks and the Workshops - SecureComm 2007
Computer Science