Edge-aided searchable data sharing scheme for IoV in the 5G environment

Abstract

The development of 5G technology provides huge potential for the Internet of Vehicles (IoV). In the IoV scenario, the secure exchange of traffic warning data is necessary to guarantee the safety of pedestrians, vehicles, and public transport facilities. However, there remain a series of challenging issues to achieve data secure sharing while ensuring efficiency. Current solutions such as the data outsourcing storage of traditional centralized cloud servers may cause information leakage due to their incomplete credibility. To address these problems mentioned above, this paper proposes an edge-aided searchable data sharing scheme based on blockchain for IoV in a 5G environment. First, the proposed scheme stores the search index of the keyword and the hash value of the data ciphertext on the blockchain to ensure its integrity and authenticity, and the smart contract automatically verifies the search trapdoor. And then, an edge caching mechanism is designed to quickly feedback on users’ retrieval needs based on a cloud-edge collaboration model. In addition, attribute-based searchable encryption is used to ensure that only the users who meet the access attributes and policy can decrypt the encrypted traffic warning data, which can achieve fine-grained access control and keyword search simultaneously. Finally, security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that our scheme is secure and more efficient compared with other schemes.