A Privacy-Preserving Attribute-Based Authenticated Key Management Scheme for Accountable Vehicular Communications

In recent years, the vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), recognized as the fundamental infrastructure of the intelligent transportation system (ITS), has played an increasingly momentous role in advancing real-time vehicular communications. With the purpose of achieving seamless and reliable connectivity, lots of research efforts have been witnessed. Nevertheless, the flexibility of access control and authenticated key management (AKM) has not been properly guaranteed. Particularly, exclusive V2V connections without third-party intervention or remote surveillance are crucial for privacy protection, while the non-repudiation and authenticity properties may be compromised in this case. In the proposed design, the attribute-based secret sharing scheme is adopted so that the flexible authentication mechanism with a dynamic access policy is provided. Moreover, independent V2V connections with anonymity are achieved. The vital vehicular data are autonomously stored in local storage, while the remote trusted authority (TA) maintains its ciphered form simultaneously. Therefore, repudiation on the historical transmissions can be prevented whenever a dispute occurs. The proofs and discussions regarding vital security features are presented, while the performance analysis follows. Advantages in terms of security and performance properties can be proved compared with the state-of-the-art.