QueryCom: Secure Message Communication and Data Searching Protocols for Smart Transportation

Vehicular Cloud Computing (VCC) extends the scope of smart transportation applications through sharing vehicular data and resources. It is thus pivotal to transmit, save, and extract vital data with adequate security and privacy protections. There is yet no lightweight vehicular data exchange mechanism for resource-constrained environments that simultaneously offers secure and low-cost message transmission, data storage, and information searching. State-of-the-art vehicular communication protocols are also vulnerable to crucial security attacks and require more computational resources during the implementation. We, therefore, propose secure and efficient message communication, data storage, and information searching protocols (named QueryCom) for smart transportation. The QueryCom is designed using SHA-512 and Advanced Encryption Standard (AES-256), preserving security and user anonymity attributes. Further, an index-based sequential searching method is used to effectually obtain information from the Vehicular Cloud (VC) database. We evaluate QueryCom based on the security proof and attacks analysis to confirm its security robustness against crucial security attributes. The experimental testbed results (on Raspberry Pi 3B+) are discussed to analyze the computational proficiency based on different performance parameters, i.e., time complexity (to search information from the VC database), computation time, storage cost, communication overhead, and energy consumption.