Secure V2V Communication with Identity-based Cryptography from License Plate Recognition

The deployment of secure vehicle-to-vehicle communication is essential for recent technologies such as autonomous driving and traffic optimizations. In this paper we experiment with the use of license plates as a mean to identify vehicles and use this identification number to bootstrap security based on identity-based cryptographic schemes. Since the deployment of the public-key infrastructure may be difficult at a large scale for the automotive environment, the use of identity-based cryptography may offer benefits since it does not require public-key certificates. We present experiments based on Android smartphones in order to determine the feasibility of deploying this technology. Our experiments are concerned with both the impact of the underlying cryptographic primitives and the range at which license plates can be recognized by smartphone cameras.