Using Range-Revocable Pseudonyms to Provide Backward Unlinkability in the Edge (Extended Version)

TL;DR

This paper introduces Range-Revocable Pseudonyms (RRPs), a cryptographic scheme enabling efficient, revocable pseudonyms with backward unlinkability, and demonstrates its application in a VANET access control system called EDGAR with promising performance.

Contribution

The paper presents RRPs, a novel cryptographic pseudonym scheme with efficient revocation and unlinkability, and applies it to develop EDGAR for secure VANET access control.

Findings

RRPs enable efficient pseudonym revocation within specific time ranges.

EDGAR achieves low-latency authentication with effective backward unlinkability.

Revocation information space grows logarithmically with granularity.

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel abstraction that we have named Range-Revocable Pseudonyms (RRPs). RRPs are a new class of pseudonyms whose validity can be revoked for any time-range within its original validity period. The key feature of RRPs is that the information provided to revoke a pseudonym for a given timerange cannot be linked with the information provided when using the pseudonym outside the revoked range. We provide an algorithm to implement RRPs using efficient cryptographic primitives where the space complexity of the pseudonym is constant, regardless of the granularity of the revocation range, and the space complexity of the revocation information only grows logarithmically with the granularity; this makes the use of RRPs far more efficient than the use of many short-lived pseudonyms. We have used RRPs to design EDGAR, an access control system for VANET scenarios that offers backward unlinkability. The experimental evaluation of EDGAR shows that, when using RRPs, the revocation can be performed efficiently (even when using time slots as small as 1 second) and that users can authenticate with low latency ($0.5-3.5$ ms).