Security Concept with Distributed Trust-Levels for Autonomous Cooperative Vehicle Networks

The newly proposed cooperative intelligent transportation system (cITS) is a big step towards completely autonomous driving. It is a key requirement for vehicles to exchange crucial information. Only with exchanged data, such as hazard warnings or route planning each vehicle will have enough information to find its way without a driver. However, this data has to be authentic and trustworthy, since it will directly influence the behavior of every vehicle inside such a network. For authentic messages, public key infrastructure (PKI)-based asymmetric cryptography mechanisms were already proposed by different organizations, such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). The second crucial information of trustworthiness is still missing. In this paper, a new security concept is presented, which introduces a trust-level for each vehicle to enable an assessment, whether data is trustworthy or not. Besides, a Pretty Good Privacy (PGP)-inspired certificate administration is proposed to manage the certificates and their affiliated trust-level. The new concept mitigates sybil attacks and increases the speed of data processing inside vehicles.