Digital Certificate Usage and Management in Vehicular Communication Systems

Digital certificates and their usage are the fundamental building block of vehicular communication, which is commonly called “Vehicle-to-Everything”, or “V2X” in short. As the security solution of vehicular communication, these digital certificates verify the authenticity of transmitting vehicles and integrity of their communications with the use of digital signatures. The entire life cycle management (generation, distribution, usage, revocation) of these digital certificates are facilitated by vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (V-PKI) as the certificate management system. International standards, such as ETSI ITS and IEEE 1609 define this PKI system architectures and detailed procedures to achieve this goal. Large-scale proliferation of these systems is expected to occur in coming years. Vehicular communication, combined with autonomous driving technology, is expected to play a pivotal role in the transformation of how vehicles are driven in the future. Security and privacy of these technologies need to be guaranteed in such systems to ensure that vehicles do not become victims of cyberattacks. This is paramount importance as vehicular communication represents Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in which failure events can result in physical damage, injury or death. In this respect, we investigate these aforementioned standards, and evaluate their level of maturity and commercial-readiness from security and privacy perspectives. We identify any security and privacy-related issues and gaps in these standards, and propose solutions as enhancements in these standards.