Secure Management of Autonomous Vehicle Platooning

Platooning is an emerging Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) application that can have a huge impact on road traffic. It allows vehicles to travel in a convoy manner, very close to each other with constant speeds and gaps. It uses Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) as the underlying communication framework. These are a type of network with a set of very specific characteristics, making it an easy target for attackers. Frequent disconnections, topology change, communication over the air among others, create vulnerabilities easily exploitable. The goal of this paper is to present how to secure the communication between the several nodes of a platooning by using an existing security model. After a careful research and evaluation, the Vehicular Ad hoc Network Public Key Infrastructure and Attribute Based Encryption with Identity Manager (VPKIbrID) model was chosen. It provides a whole solution with tools for secure message exchange and entity authentication. The impact of the introduced security model was evaluated using simulations with different platoon sizes and VPKIbrID modes. The several operations of the platoon will be carried using the Platoon Management Protocol (PMP). The result analysis allowed to verify that when using a VPKIbrID mode that allows multicast/broadcast communications, the vehicles sent much fewer messages than the mode that only supports unicast. The performance results indicate that the vehicles should use VPKIbrID Public Key Infrastructure (VPKIbrID-PKI) for maneuvers and VPKIbrID Attribute Based Encryption (VPKIbrID-ABE) to exchange platoon beacons or any message exchanged to all platoon members. Moreover, the messages broadcasted in a platoon group will always have the same targets, with the same attributes, being a perfect use case for the usages of cached keys.