A Security Credential Management System for V2V Communications

We present a security credential management system for vehicle-to-vehicle communications, which has been developed under a Cooperative Agreement with the US Department of Transportation. This system is currently being finalized, and it is the leading candidate design for the V2V security backend design in the US, subject to review by the US Department of Transportation and other stakeholders. It issues digital certificates to participating vehicles for establishing trust among them, which is necessary for safety applications based on vehicle-to-vehicle communications. It supports four main use cases, namely, bootstrapping, certificate provisioning, misbehavior reporting and revocation. The main design goal is to provide both security and privacy to the largest extent reasonable and possible. To achieve the latter, vehicles are issued pseudonym certificates, and the provisioning of those certificates is divided among multiple organizations. One of the main challenges is to facilitate efficient revocation while providing privacy against attacks from insiders.