On the potential of PUF for pseudonym generation in vehicular networks

Abstract

Most proposals for security of vehicular networks foresee the generation of a comparatively large number of changing pseudonyms to prevent vehicles from being identified or tracked. Most proposals rely on communication with backend pseudonym providers to refill a vehicle's pseudonym pool which creates a number of problems, one being secure storage and handling of a large amount of private key material. In this paper we investigate the usage of Physical Unclonable Functions (PUFs) and Public PUFs (PPUFs) instead of Hardware Security Modules for this purpose. We describe a possible solution that uses PUF and Fuzzy Extractors to provide the necessary stability.