Cloud-based security and privacy-aware information dissemination over ubiquitous VANETs

Abstract The rapid advancement of automobile industry enables the production of the high-tech vehicles equipped with more computing and communication power. This phenomenon explodes the development of rich vehicular applications for intelligent and safe transportation systems. However, security and privacy are one of the major concerns in cloud-based Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). In this paper, we propose a cloud-based security and privacy-aware information dissemination environment between vehicular nodes and cloud infrastructure. Information Vectors (IVs) enable the sharing of fine-grained information among vehicular nodes and the cloud system. In this scheme, we couple the identity-based signature (IBS) with a pseudonym to not only provide authentication for IVs but also ensure the privacy of vehicular nodes. Moreover, we take on ciphertext policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to implement the access control systems and effective access policies for both cloud and VANETs. The experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed scheme in terms of computational overhead, space overhead and IVs authentication.