Protecting Vehicular Cloud against malicious nodes using zone authorities

Vehicle's resources, sensors and in-vehicle's technologies allow it to collect data about its status, driver, surrounding vehicles, roads, etc. Recently, Vehicular Cloud (VC) has emerged as a promising technology that utilizes vehicle's underutilized devices and their data as a main source of decisions for clients such as intelligent transportation system, automakers, third part applications, business companies and others. However, malicious nodes may take advantages of VC weak protection and present threats to their data, resources and services. We study the problem of the malicious nodes in VC and we propose a secure framework that leverages keys management and revocation mechanisms to protect VC against malicious nodes. The framework uses multiple zone authorities, where each one controls a zone (area) consists of road side units (RSUs), vehicles and the clients at that zone. Each zone authority works as a gateway that authenticates the operations of that zone, controls the services' requested and the data flow, and finally preserves the privacy of the vehicles, the clients and the cloud entities involved. Revocation mechanisms are used to generate revoked lists of malicious vehicles and clients implemented using skip lists. The framework efficiently prevents malicious nodes from using the vehicular cloud in light, secure and efficient way.