SCPP: Secure Credential Provisioning Protocol for Cellular Vehicles

Recently, a special type of edge computing, known as Mobile Edge Computing (MEC), has emerged to satisfy various demands of different user types with minimum latency and high mobility support. Whereas, vehicle users are still in need to have a similar technology that would help them to receive more efficient services. In this paper, we adopt an edge computing paradigm for vehicular users, known as Vehicular Edge Computing (VEC). Our proposed architecture, called "SCPP", is composed of multiple layers interconnected by a network infrastructure that is used for secure credential provisioning for vehicles. However, since Road Side Units (RSUs) are deployed in dense traffic areas due to their high cost of installation, it is an important issue to consider the scenario where there are no RSUs deployed especially in rural areas. Hence, in our architecture, we use cellular vehicles that are equipped with 5G technology which make them able to communicate directly with a 5G base station without the need of an access point such as a RSU. Also, we include in our architecture a novel VEC server in each 5G base station, known as 5G-based VEC, which is used for providing security services for vehicles at the edge of mobile network. Besides that, the proposed protocol adopts a novel way that uses base station-to-base station (BS-to-BS) communication to account for high mobility of vehicles and guarantee message delivery for vehicles. Finally, we discuss the different security services provided by our system to overcome most of the state-of-the-art attacks and also we evaluate our system performance.