Self-certified public key implicit certificate scheme for drivers' anonymity in Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication networks

In Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication networks, vehicles will broadcast their safety-critical information, such as speed, position and direction, to alert nearby vehicles of possible collisions. The use of a standard public key certificate to secure the broadcast of the safety-critical information will allow unauthorized entities to identify and trace movements and locations a driver visits using the driver's unique public key in the certificate. In this paper, we propose a self-certified public key implicit certificate scheme for use in V2V communication networks to preserve the anonymity of drivers. In our proposed scheme, recipients of a broadcasted message in V2V communication networks can authenticate and validate the integrity of the message without identifying the transmitter. In case of a dispute and malicious activities, the identity of the vehicle which broadcasted the disputed message can be revealed only by a trusted authority. Using an elliptic-curve key-length of 256 bits, we show that our proposed scheme adds 238 bytes to the vehicle's safety-critical information in the broadcasted message.