Dynamic fine-grained access control scheme for vehicular ad hoc networks

Abstract

Secure communication in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has been extensively researched; however, access control in VANETs has not been studied adequately. Access control ensures that only authorized vehicles receive quality services over the VANETs to enhance the driving experience. Attribute-based encryption (ABE) with revocation is a promising access control technique that keeps data confidential and is suitable for application in VANETs. However, most existing revocable ABE schemes require the private keys of all non-revoked users to be updated if the private key of any user is revoked, which makes the implementation of such schemes extremely inefficient. In this paper, a dynamic fine-grained access control scheme based on ABE is proposed to ensure vehicle network security. It enables the message sender to determine which vehicles receive the message according to their attributes and can also freely revoke the decryption authorization of certain vehicles without needing to update all non-revoked keys. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that secure and efficient dynamic access control in VANETs has been achieved. Performance analysis and simulation evaluations have shown that the algorithm is more efficient in terms of computational delay and communication overhead, as compared with existing schemes.