Efficient and Spontaneous Privacy-Preserving Protocol for Secure Vehicular Communications

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel privacy-preserving protocol for vehicular networks that enables fast, local, and efficient authentication of safety messages while maintaining user privacy and allowing identity recovery by authorities.

Contribution

It introduces a spontaneous, efficient, and privacy-preserving protocol based on revocable ring signatures for secure vehicular communications.

Findings

Provides conditional privacy with identity revocation by trusted authorities

Enables local message authentication without roadside unit support

Offers fast verification and low storage requirements

Abstract

This paper introduces an efficient and spontaneous privacy-preserving protocol for vehicular ad-hoc networks based on revocable ring signature. The proposed protocol has three appealing characteristics: First, it offers conditional privacy-preservation: while a receiver can verify that a message issuer is an authorized participant in the system only a trusted authority can reveal the true identity of a message sender. Second, it is spontaneous: safety messages can be authenticated locally, without support from the roadside units or contacting other vehicles. Third, it is efficient by offering fast message authentication and verification, cost-effective identity tracking in case of a dispute, and low storage requirements. We use extensive analysis to demonstrate the merits of the proposed protocol and to contrast it with previously proposed solutions.