An experimental analysis of ECQV implicit certificates performance in VANETs

Emerging Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) enable improved driving experience and safety guarantees, but require secure Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) that must comply to strict performance constraints. Specialized standards have been defined to these aims, such as the IEEE 1609.2 that uses network-efficient cryptographic protocols to reduce communication latencies. The reduced latencies are achieved through a combination of the Elliptic Curve Qu-Vantstone (ECQV) implicit certificate scheme and the Elliptic Curve Digital Signature Algorithm (ECDSA), to guarantee data integrity and authenticity. However, literature lacks implementations and evaluations for vehicular systems. In this paper, we consider the IEEE 1609.2 standard for secure VANETs and investigate the feasibility of ECQV and ECDSA schemes when deployed in C-ITSs. We propose a prototype implementation of the standard ECQV scheme to evaluate its performance on automotive-grade hardware. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first open implementation of the scheme for constrained devices that are characterized by low computational power and low memory. We evaluate its performance against C-ITS communication latency constraints and show that, although even highly constrained devices can support the standard, complying with stricter requirements demands for higher computational resources.