Privacy preservation in secure group communications for vehicular ad hoc networks

摘要

Secure communications for vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become an important research issue these years. Many protocols for secure vehicle-to-vehicle communications and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications have been proposed, yet fewer protocols are concerned with secure group communications for VANETs. Of those existing protocols for group communications, some of them form a group of vehicles based on geographical regions and provide broadcasting to the group members with or without message confidentiality. The others allow secure vehicle-to-vehicle communications within a group with session keys, but they do not preserve user privacy for communicating parties within the group. In this paper, we propose a novel group communication scheme for vehicular networks, in which a group is formed by a set of related vehicles of the same purpose, such as a platoon of recreational vehicles targeted for the same tourist spot. The scheme not only offers efficient and secure group communications but also provides privacy preservation for vehicle-to-vehicle communications within a group. Security analysis is given to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed scheme.