Lightweight Secure Authentication and Key Distribution Scheme for Vehicular Cloud Computing

A vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is the basic block in building an intelligent transportation system that improves the traffic flow and makes needed information conveniently accessible. VANET depends on a dense exchange of sensed data between vehicles and Road Side Units (RSUs). A large amount of sensed data requires a huge computation and storage capabilities, which is provided by the vehicular cloud computing (VCC). However, the security problems of data confidentiality, access control, vehicles’ authentication, and conductors’ privacy in VCC are issues that need to be solved. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm to ensure VCC security and privacy. We use Pseudo-ID instead of vehicles’ real ID to provide conductors’ privacy, Identifier-Based Signature mechanism is used to guarantee vehicles’ authentication, and Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE) algorithm is used for key distribution. Our liGhtweight secURe AutheNticaTion and keY distribution scheme for vehicular cloud computing (GUARANTY) ensures a secure keys distribution to minimize the encryption and decryption computation cost. Vehicles use a symmetrical cryptography in their communication. We analyze the security of our algorithm using AVISPA tool. We use this tool to simulate insiders and outsiders attacks. We evaluate our algorithm’s performance in terms of computation delay and reception rate.