Verifying Mobility Data Under Privacy Considerations in Car-to-X Communication

Inter-vehicle communication and communication between vehicles and infrastructure (Car-to-X, C2X) is a promising technology to improve road safety and driver’s convenience. Vehicles create an ad-hoc network with adjacent vehicles or roadside stations in order to transmit messages. These messages may contain warnings of hazardous situations (e.g., hard braking vehicles) or information for traffic efficiency enhancements. All applications using C2X messages rely heavily on the accuracy and reliability of the provided information. Therefore system protection against compromised messages generated by possible attackers or faulty vehicles is a key factor for successful deployment of C2X technology. All messages contain mobility information of the transmitting vehicle. Therefore security mechanisms based on cryptographic primitives may be enhanced by verification mechanisms which evaluate the plausibility of transmitted mobility information. In this work, the authors propose a Kalman filter-based approach for efficient mobility verification of neighboring vehicles. The filter is integrated into a verification framework, capable of verifying mobility data even under privacy considerations (i.e. changing pseudonyms). The framework has been developed to fit into an overall C2X system architecture and will be deployed in the context of the project “Safe and Intelligent Mobility Test Field Germany” (simTD), a large scale field operational test for C2X communication. Hence, privacy mechanisms, application support, scalability and performance limitation determined by simTD are regarded.