Distributing blackbox data to multiple vehicles in a secure and privacy-preserving manner

In addition to information such as the track of wheels, vehicle blackbox data (like a blackbox in an aeroplane) provides another major source of information for the study of the cause of car accidents. However, according to a study, 5% of blackboxes were destroyed in traffic accidents and about 35% data inside a blackbox could not be retrieved. With the setup of vehicular ad hoc network (VANET), it is motivated to store the blackbox data in a distributed manner in the road-side units of such a network. This scheme works well provided that there are enough road-side units installed. But this assumption is not valid in rural areas and also may impose a large overhead to road-side units. In this paper, we propose a distributed scheme that allows vehicles to periodically broadcast blackbox data to nodes nearby (other vehicles) as extra backup. And the trusted authority can reveal those data from recipients. The proposed scheme will ensure the integrity and confidentiality of messages as well as the privacy of drivers. We show that our scheme is secure and the performance is reasonable through simulation.