IOTA-VPKI: A DLT-Based and Resource Efficient Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure

Abstract

Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) show many potential benefits to the way we travel today. The security requirements to be matched in this kind of systems are challenging and they show technical, societal, legal, and economical concerns (e.g. anonymity, accountability, non-repudiation). To address security, standardization bodies (IEEE 1609.2, ETSI) and harmonization efforts (Car2Car Communication Consortium (C2C-CC)) have proposed a Certification Authority-based (CA-based) Vehicular Public Key Infrastructure (VPKI) which still suffers of Single Point of Failure (SPoF) locate in CAs and does not provide transparency in the certificate issuance. We propose IOTA-VPKI, a Distributed Ledger Technology-based (DLT-based) VPKI that improve the state-of-the-art eliminating SPoF with seamless scalability with respect to the users. IOTA-VPKI also guarantees transparency in the issuance of certificates as well as historical proof-of-possession by storing signed and hashed certificates on the IOTA ledger to facilitate verification procedure. The use of IOTA DLT assure also the feasible deploy in Internet of Things (IoT) domain, where the devices involved have limited computational resources. The effectiveness of our DLT-based VPKI will be measured in testbed for EU Horizon 2020-funded AUTOmated driving Progressed by Internet Of Things (AUTOPILOT) project.