Efficient message authentication scheme with forward and backward security in Vehicle Cloud Network towards sustainable smart city

Abstract

The Vehicular Cloud Network (VCN) serves as a crucial component of Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS), playing an instrumental role in the development of sustainable smart cities. It merges the benefits of both Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) and cloud computing. However, VCN faces significant security challenges due to the complexity of communication, the dynamic nature of the environment, and the privacy concerns of data. To address the issues of message security and privacy preservation in VCN, this paper introduces an identity-based key-insulated ring signature (ID-KIRS) scheme for VCN message authentication. Our scheme integrates a secure key update function to address key exposure issues, providing both forward and backward security. The security analysis confirms that our scheme ensures message integrity, unconditional anonymity, and unforgeability. The performance evaluation clearly demonstrates our scheme is efficient, and applicable to vehicle congestion situations, especially car accident scenarios.