An efficient voting based decentralized revocation protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) enable cooperative behaviors in vehicular environments and are seen as an integral component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSs). The security of VANETs is crucial for their successful deployment and widespread adoption. A critical aspect of preserving the security and privacy of VANETs is the efficient revocation of the ability of misbehaving or malicious vehicles to participate in the network. This is normally achieved by revoking the validity of the digital certificates of the offending nodes and by maintaining and distributing an accurate Certificate Revocation List (CRL). The immediate revocation of misbehaving vehicles is of prime importance for the safety of other vehicles and users. In this paper, we present a decentralized revocation approach based on Shamir's secret sharing to revoke misbehaving vehicles with very low delays. Besides enhancing VANETs' security, our proposed protocol limits the size of the revocation list to the number of the revoked vehicles. Consequently, the authentication process is more efficient and the communication overhead is reduced. We experimentally evaluate our protocol to demonstrate that it provides a reliable solution to the scalability, efficiency and security of VANETs.