Network packet

Message authentication code

Scheme (mathematics)

Overhead (engineering)

Computer security

Encryption

Anonymity

Operating system

Wireless ad hoc network

Telecommunications

Computer science

Traceability

Mobile ad hoc network

Distributed computing

Public-key cryptography

Revocation

Computer network

Certificate authority

Mathematics

Political science

Group signature

Credential

Mathematical analysis

Cryptography

Vehicular ad hoc network

Software engineering

Authentication (law)

Wireless

Revocation list

Pseudonym

Key (lock)

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking

In this paper, we introduce an attribute-based framework to achieve secure communications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which enjoys several advantageous features. The proposed framework employs attribute-based signature (ABS) to achieve message authentication and integrity and protect vehicle privacy, which greatly mitigates the overhead caused by pseudonym/private key change or update in the existing solutions for VANETs based on symmetric key, asymmetric key, and identity-based cryptography and group signature. In addition, we extend a standard ABS scheme with traceability and revocation mechanisms and seamlessly integrate them into the proposed framework to support vehicle traceability and revocation by a trusted authority, and thus, the resulting scheme for vehicular communications does not suffer from the anonymity misuse issue, which has been a challenge for anonymous credential-based vehicular protocols. Finally, we implement the proposed ABS scheme using a rapid prototyping tool called Charm to evaluate its performance.

An Attribute-Based Framework for Secure Communications in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks