Efficient proxy ring signature for VANET

Abstract

The messages in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANET) are vulnerable to attack in the open wireless environment. Group communication in VANET is receiving more attention, which confronts many security issues. First, only users who have passed legal authentication can communicate in the group. The ring signature is an effective solution. In addition, the group membership in the vehicular self-organising network changes rapidly, which leads to dynamic adjustment of group members. It is necessary to consider the computing power and communication capability of each node in the group members. To speed up the authentication process, a roadside unit with more computing power and communication capability than vehicles is selected as the signature agent, which effectively reduces the computational load of vehicles and accelerates the communication throughput. Meanwhile, the computational task and communication overhead have not been well-solved. To address these issues, this paper proposed an efficient proxy ring signature scheme for VANET to achieve higher signature efficiency and lower transmission overhead. The scheme allows both privacy protection and original signer tracing. Security analysis shows that the proposed scheme meets the security requirements of VANET.