Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) are powerful platforms for vehicular data services and applications. The increasing number of vehicles has made the vehicular network diverse, dynamic, and large-scale, making it difficult to meet the 5G network’s demanding requirements. Decentralized systems are interesting and provide attractive services because they are publicly available (transparency), have an append-only ledger (robust integrity protection), remove single points of failure, and enable distributed key management and communication in a peer-to-peer network. Researchers dedicated substantial efforts to advancing vehicle communications, however conventional cryptographic mechanisms are insufficient which enabled us to look at decentralized technologies. Therefore, we revisit decentralized approaches with VANETs. Endpoint devices hold a wallet which may incorporate threshold key management methods like MPC wallets, HD Wallets, or multi-party threshold ECDSA/EdDSA/BLS. We also discuss trust management approaches and demonstrate how decentralization can improve integrity, security, privacy, and resilience to single points of failure. We also conduct a comprehensive review, comparing them with current requirements, and the latest authentication and secure communication architectures, which require the involvement of trusted but non-transparent authorities in certificate issuance/revocation. We highlight the limitations of these schemes from PKI deployment and recommend future research, particularly in the realm of quantum cryptography.

车辆自组织网络 (VANET) 是用于车辆数据服务和应用程序的强大平台。车辆数量的不断增加，使得车载网络多样化、动态化、规模化，难以满足5G网络的苛刻要求。去中心化系统很有趣，并提供有吸引力的服务，因为它们是公开可用的（透明度），具有仅附加分类账（强大的完整性保护），消除单点故障，并在对等网络中启用分布式密钥管理和通信。研究人员投入了大量精力来推进车辆通信，但传统的加密机制不足以让我们研究去中心化技术。因此，我们重新审视 VANET 的去中心化方法。端点设备持有一个钱包，该钱包可能包含阈值密钥管理方法，如 MPC 钱包、HD 钱包或多方阈值 ECDSA/EdDSA/BLS。我们还讨论了信任管理方法，并演示了去中心化如何提高完整性、安全性、隐私性和单点故障恢复能力。我们还进行了全面的审查，将它们与当前的要求以及最新的身份验证和安全通信架构进行比较，这些架构需要受信任但不透明的权威机构参与证书颁发/撤销。我们强调了 PKI 部署中这些方案的局限性，并建议未来的研究，特别是在量子密码学领域。