Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

Recently, car manufacturers and telecommunication industries gear up to equip each car with the technology that allows the drivers and passengers to communicate with each other as well as with the roadside infrastructure, which is located in some critical sections of the road, such as at every traffic light or any intersection or any stop sign, in order to improve the driving experience and make driving safer. This is also referred to as Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs), which is expected to serve as a fundamental functional block for construting an Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). With VANETs, security and privacy preservation have been identified as critical issues in pushing success of such application scenarios. Motivated by its great potential markets and significance to the human welfare, we are committed to investigate the related problems by bringing together a group of scientists and research engineers along with our industry partner - SparkMatrix Technologies Inc., aiming to come up with a suite of interoperable strategies in addressing the most important design requirements for VANETs in the aspect of security and privacy preservation. In specific, under the public key infrastructure (PKI), we will focus on developing user conditional privacy prerservation and certificate revocation. In roder to achieve better performance, we will study batch signature verification and seure multicasting based on Timed Efficient Stream Loss-tolerant Authentication (TESLA) protocol. We expect that the project will lead to significant research results not only in pushing the succes of VANETs, but also in contributing to the progress of fundamental related studies.