Conditional Anonymous Authentication With Abuse-Resistant Tracing and Distributed Trust for Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV) was proposed as an approach to enable intelligent traffic management and enhance road safety. In order to achieve the intended objective of improving road safety, vehicles are required to constantly broadcast messages to the traffic management infrastructure as well as to other vehicles in the vicinity. Cybersecurity protection of the IoV system is critical as security attacks on IoV and safety-related messages could be life threatening. In this connection, it is essential to ensure the authenticity of IoV messages. Whereas, from the angle of privacy protection, it is undesirable to directly authenticate the identities of vehicles that send the IoV messages. To cope with these conflicting requirements, researchers proposed the notion of conditional anonymous authentication, which aims to authenticate message senders anonymously. When necessary, a trusted third party, named tracer, will be allowed to reveal the true identities of malicious vehicles who sent fake messages. However, existing security techniques, including pseudonyms and group signatures typically assume that the tracer is trusted. This assumption may not be desirable in situations when a curious tracer may reveal the identities of honest vehicles in the IoV system. To address this challenge, this article proposes a privacy-preserving authentication scheme with abuse-resistant tracing. Compared with existing conditional anonymous authentication schemes, our scheme prevents a single tracer from revealing the identity of vehicles. Besides, the tracing key is generated in a distributed manner, and hence no single authority in the system can reveal the true identity of a vehicle.

Automated summary

This article proposes a privacy-preserving authentication scheme with abuse-resistant tracing to protect the identity privacy of vehicles in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) system.