An efficient distributed key management scheme for group‐signature based anonymous authentication in VANET

Abstract

ABSTRACTGroup signature is one of the well‐known cryptographic primitives for anonymous authentication which is the fundamental requirement for securing vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), but it is prone to cause huge revocation overhead in VANETs with millions of nodes and serious security risk. To solve this problem, we develop an efficient distributed key management scheme (DKM) where the whole domain of VANET is divided into several sub‐regions, and any vehicle has to update its group secret key periodically from the regional group manager who manages the region where the vehicle stays. Unlike the previously reported works, DKM prevents vehicles from leaking the value of the updated group secret key to the regional group manager during the group key updating process. Subsequently, it is capable of identifying either the compromised regional authorities or the malicious vehicles. Moreover, performance analysis demonstrates that DKM can reduce the revocation cost significantly while the communication cost for key updating is small. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.