A Transparent Distributed Ledger-based Certificate Revocation Scheme for VANETs

Among the available communication systems, vehicular networks are emerging as one of the most promising and yet most challenging instantiations of mobile ad-hoc network technologies. The deployment of such networks in large scale requires the enforcement of stringent security mechanisms that need to abide by the technical, societal, legal, and economical requirements of Intelligent Transportation Systems. Authentication is an effective process for validating user identity in vehicular netoworks. However, it cannot guarantee the network security by itself. Available industrial standards do not consider methods to promptly revoke misbehaving vehicles. The only available protection consists on the \textit{revocation by expiry}, which tolerates the misbehaving vehicle to remain trusted in the system for a long time (e.g. 3 months with certificate pre-loading according to EU security policy). This poses a huge yet dangerous limitation to the security of the vehicular ecosystem. In this work we propose a Distributed Ledger-based Certificate Revocation Scheme for Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) that harnesses the advantages of the underlying Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) to implement a privacy-aware revocation process that is fully transparent to all participating entities and meets the critical message processing times defined by EU and US standards. An experimental validation and analysis demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed scheme, where the DLT streamlines the revocation operation overhead and delivers an economic solution against cyber-attacks in vehicular systems.