Pseudonym-Based Cryptography and Its Application in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

As the cornerstone of the future intelligent transportation system, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted intensive attention from the academic and industrial research communities in recent years. For widespread deployment of VANETs, security and privacy issues must be addressed properly. In this paper, we introduce the notion of pseudonym-based cryptography, and present a provable secure pseudonym-based cryptosystems with a trusted authority that includes a pseudonym-based multi-receiver encryption scheme, a pseudonym-based signature scheme, and a pseudonym-based key establishment protocol. We then propose a secure and efficient data access scheme for VANETs based on cooperative caching technology and our proposed pseudonym-based cryptosystems. On the one hand, the efficiency of data access are greatly improved by allowing the sharing and coordination of cached data among multiple vehicles. On the other hand, anonymity of the vehicles, data confidentiality, integrity and non-repudiation are guaranteed by employing our proposed pseudonym-based cryptosystems. Simulation results have shown that our proposed pseudonym-based cryptosystems are suitable to the VANETs environment.