Towards a Zero Trust Decentralized Identity Management System for Secure Autonomous Vehicles

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Yousseef, Amal, Satam, Shalaka, Latibari, Banafsheh Saber, Abdel-Malek, Mai, Salehi, Soheil, Satam, Pratik
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866914218198958080
author Yousseef, Amal
Satam, Shalaka
Latibari, Banafsheh Saber
Abdel-Malek, Mai
Salehi, Soheil
Satam, Pratik
author_facet Yousseef, Amal
Satam, Shalaka
Latibari, Banafsheh Saber
Abdel-Malek, Mai
Salehi, Soheil
Satam, Pratik
contents Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on pervasive connectivity to enable cooperative and safety-critical applications, but this connectivity also exposes them to a wide range of cybersecurity threats. Existing perimeter-based security and centralized identity management approaches are inadequate for highly dynamic V2X environments, as they depend on implicit trust and suffer from scalability and single-point-of-failure limitations. This paper proposes D-IM, a Zero Trust-based decentralized identity management and authentication framework for secure V2X communication. D-IM integrates continuous verification with a permissioned blockchain to eliminate centralized trust assumptions and enforce explicit, verifiable identity relationships among vehicles and infrastructure. The framework is designed around clear Zero Trust-aligned goals, including mutual authentication, decentralization, privacy protection, non-repudiation, and traceability, and addresses a comprehensive attacker model covering identity, data integrity, collusion, availability, and accountability threats. We present the D-IM system architecture and identification and authorization protocol, and validate its security properties through both qualitative analysis and a formal BAN logic-based verification. Simulation results in urban and highway scenarios using DSRC and C-V2X demonstrate that D-IM introduces limited overhead while preserving network performance, supporting its practicality for real-world AV deployments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_25566
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards a Zero Trust Decentralized Identity Management System for Secure Autonomous Vehicles
Yousseef, Amal
Satam, Shalaka
Latibari, Banafsheh Saber
Abdel-Malek, Mai
Salehi, Soheil
Satam, Pratik
Cryptography and Security
Autonomous vehicles (AVs) rely on pervasive connectivity to enable cooperative and safety-critical applications, but this connectivity also exposes them to a wide range of cybersecurity threats. Existing perimeter-based security and centralized identity management approaches are inadequate for highly dynamic V2X environments, as they depend on implicit trust and suffer from scalability and single-point-of-failure limitations. This paper proposes D-IM, a Zero Trust-based decentralized identity management and authentication framework for secure V2X communication. D-IM integrates continuous verification with a permissioned blockchain to eliminate centralized trust assumptions and enforce explicit, verifiable identity relationships among vehicles and infrastructure. The framework is designed around clear Zero Trust-aligned goals, including mutual authentication, decentralization, privacy protection, non-repudiation, and traceability, and addresses a comprehensive attacker model covering identity, data integrity, collusion, availability, and accountability threats. We present the D-IM system architecture and identification and authorization protocol, and validate its security properties through both qualitative analysis and a formal BAN logic-based verification. Simulation results in urban and highway scenarios using DSRC and C-V2X demonstrate that D-IM introduces limited overhead while preserving network performance, supporting its practicality for real-world AV deployments.
title Towards a Zero Trust Decentralized Identity Management System for Secure Autonomous Vehicles
topic Cryptography and Security
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25566