Carnegie Mellon Carnegie Mellon General Motors Carnegie Mellon

Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) require some mechanism to help authenticate messages, identify valid vehicles, and re-move malevolent vehicles. A Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) can provide this functionality using certificates and fixed public keys. However, fixed keys allow an eavesdropper to associate a key with a vehicle and a location, violating drivers ’ privacy. In this work we examine a VANET key management scheme based on Temporary Anonymous Certified Keys (TACKs). Our scheme efficiently prevents eavesdroppers from linking a vehicle’s differ-ent keys and provides timely revocation of misbehaving partici-pants while maintaining the same or less overhead for vehicle-to-vehicle communication as the current IEEE 1609.2 standard for VANET security. 1