LIGHTWEIGHT GEOGRAPHIC TRAJECTORY AUTHENTICATION VIA ONE-TIME SIGNATURES

• US 20090254754A1
• Filed: 03/30/2009
• Published: 10/08/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 04/04/2008
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: GM Global Technology Operations LLC (General Motors Company)
• Original Assignee: GM Global Technology Operations Incorporated (General Motors Company)
• Inventors: Iyer, Aravind V., Bellur, Bhargav Ramchandra
• Application Number:
  US12/413,741
• Publication Number:
  US 20090254754A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 713/176
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2209/30 Compression, e.g. Merkle-Damgard construction
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2209/805 Lightweight hardware, e.g. radio-frequency identification [RFID] or sensor
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 2209/84 Vehicles
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/006 involving public key infrastructure [PKI] trust models network architecture or network communication protocol for supporting authentication of entities using certificates in a packet data network H04L63/0823
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/3247 involving digital signatures
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/50 using hash chains, e.g. blockchains or hash trees

Abstract

A system and method for a vehicle-to-vehicle communications system that provide active safety applications employing lightweight geographic authentication using one-time signatures. The system and method require each vehicle to construct a discretized representation of its trajectory, which captures its kinematical history to a tunable degree of accuracy and to a tunable extent in the past. This trajectory information is then signed using a one-time signature. Thus, with every periodic message, the sending vehicle transmits the usual application payload, a signed version of the trajectory as described, and the digital signature over all of the fields.

Claims

1. A method for authenticating a message sent in a vehicle-to-vehicle communications system, said method comprising:

generating a message to be sent that includes a message payload, a verifier, a lightweight one-time signature and a public key infrastructure (PKI) based digital signature, said message including information representing the vehicle'"'"'s trajectory and kinematic history;

transmitting the message from the vehicle; and

receiving the message at another vehicle that verifies the message using the lightweight authenticator and/or the digital signature.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the one-time signature is a Merkle-Winternitz one-time signature.

3. The method of claim 1, wherein the authentication method is used in a blind spot warning system.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein the authentication method is used in a cooperative collision warning system.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the message includes a timed efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication (TESLA) code.

6. A vehicle-to-vehicle communications system, comprising:

a broadcast authentication mechanism configured to append an outgoing message with a public key infrastructure (PKI) based digital signature and a one-time signature; and

an authentication mechanism configured to verify the digital signature and/or the lightweight authenticator transmitted by the broadcast authentication mechanism.

7. The system of claim 6, wherein the broadcast authentication mechanism transmits a message payload that includes real-time kinematics information that represents one or more of position, velocity and direction.

8. The system of claim 6, wherein the broadcast authentication mechanism further includes a mechanism for periodically broadcasting kinematical vehicle information.

9. The system of claim 6, wherein vehicle trajectory information is embedded into the outgoing message.

10. The system according to claim 6 wherein the authentication mechanism is a lightweight authentication mechanism.

11. The system of claim 10, wherein the lightweight authentication mechanism employs a Merkle-Winternitz one-time signature mechanism.

12. The system of claim 10, wherein the lightweight authentication mechanism authenticates only trajectory information embedded within the outgoing message.

13. The system of claim 11 wherein parameters corresponding to the authentication of the trajectory information using the Merkle-Winternitz one-time signature mechanism are tunable.

14. The system of claim 6, wherein the outgoing message includes a timed efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication (TESLA) code.

15. A method for vehicle-to-vehicle communications, comprising:

generating a periodic outgoing message that includes a message payload, a verifier, a lightweight authenticator and a digital signature; and

embedding within the message payload a discrete representation of a sending vehicle'"'"'s trajectory.

16. The method of claim 15, wherein the discrete representation of the sending vehicle'"'"'s trajectory includes two-dimensional coordinates of the sending vehicle at discrete times.

17. The method of claim 15, further including signing the discrete representation of the sending vehicle'"'"'s trajectory using a Merkle-Winternitz one-time signature mechanism.

18. The method of claim 15, further including tuning parameters of the discrete representation of the sending vehicle'"'"'s trajectory to balance computation and communication overhead.

19. The method of claim 15, wherein the outgoing message includes a timed efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication (TESLA) code.

20. The method of claim 15, wherein the method is used in a cooperative collision warning system.