Existing security and identity-based vehicular communication protocols used in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) to achieve conditional privacy-preserving mostly rely on an ideal hardware device called tamper-proof device (TPD) equipped in vehicles. Achieving fast authentication during the message verification process is usually challenging in such strategies and further they suffer performance constraints from resulting overheads. To address such challenges, this paper proposes a novel Chinese remainder theorem (CRT)-based conditional privacy-preserving authentication scheme for securing vehicular authentication. The proposed protocol only requires realistic TPDs, and eliminates the need for pre-loading the master key onto the vehicle's TPDs. Chinese remainder theorem can dynamically assist the trusted authorities (TAs) whilst generating and broadcasting new group keys to the vehicles in the network. The proposed scheme solves the leakage problem during side channel attacks, and ensures higher level of security for the entire system. In addition, the proposed scheme avoids using the bilinear pairing operation and map-to-point hash operation during the authentication process, which helps achieving faster verification even under increasing number of signature. Moreover, the security analysis shows that our proposed scheme is secure under the random oracle model and the performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme is efficient in reducing computation and communication overheads.

With the advancements in social media and rising demand for real traffic information, the data shared in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) indicate that the size and amount of requested data will continue increasing. Vehicles in the same area often have similar data downloading requests. If we ignore the common requests, the resource allocation efficiency of the VANET system will be quite low. Motivated by this fact, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving data downloading scheme for VANETs, based on the edge computing concept. In the proposed scheme, a roadside unit (RSU) can find the popular data by analyzing the encrypted requests sent from nearby vehicles without having to sacrifice the privacy of their download requests. Further, the RSU caches the popular data in nearby qualified vehicles called edge computing vehicles (ECVs). If a vehicle wishes to download the popular data, it can download it directly from the nearby ECVs. This method increases the downloading efficiency of the system. The security analysis results show that the proposed scheme can resist multiple security attacks. The performance analysis results demonstrate that our scheme has reasonable computation and communication overhead. Finally, the OMNeT++ simulation results indicate that our scheme has good network performance.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has become a popular paradigm for managing large-scale networks including cloud servers and data centers because of its advantages of centralized management and programmability. The issues of scalability and reliability that a single centralized controller suffers makes distributed controller architectures emerge. One key limitation of distributed controllers is the statically configured switch-controller mapping, easily causing uneven load distribution among controllers. Previous works have proposed load-balancing methods with switch migration to address this issue. However, the higher-load controller is always directly considered as the overloaded controller that need to shift its load to other controllers, even if it has no response time delay. The pursuit of absolute load-balancing effect can also result in frequent network delays and service interruptions. Additionally, if there are several overloaded controllers, just one controller with the maximum load can be addressed within a single load-balancing operation, reducing load-balancing efficiency. To address these problems, we propose SMCLBRT, a load-balancing strategy of multiple SDN controllers based on response time, considering the changing features of real-time response times versus controller loads. By selecting the appropriate response time threshold and dealing with multiple overloading controllers simultaneously, it can well solve load-balancing problem in SDN control plane with multiple overloaded controllers. Simulation experiments exhibit the effectiveness of our scheme.

Based on the functional characteristics of inter-vehicle communication networks under the current framework, a privacy preserving authentication framework that combines fifth-generation communication technology (5G) and edge computing technology is proposed. The proposed framework is different from that used in the previous 802.11p-based inter-vehicle communication network architecture, and we uses device-to-device technology to achieve communication between vehicles. One difference between a 5G-enabled model and a traditional model for vehicle ad hoc networks is that security communication between vehicles in a 5G-enabled model is challenging. The authentication protocol proposed in this study can be divided into two parts. The first part involves authenticating and selecting an edge computing vehicle, wherein a fuzzy logic mathematical method is used in the selection process. The second part is the mutual authentication between edge computing and ordinary vehicles. In this process, the exchange of security information between vehicles in a group is possible. Simultaneously, the identity privacy and traceability of the vehicle are ensured. Moreover, the proposed signature scheme is proved to be secure under a random oracle model. Performance evaluation results demonstrate that our proposed scheme has relatively lower computational and communication overhead than existing schemes.

Traditional public key infrastructure-based authentication schemes provide vehicular networks with identity authentication and conditional privacy protection, which are not sufficient for assessing the credibility of messages. Additionally, although the new generation of cellular networks (5G) can dramatically improve the transmission efficiency of the messages, many existing authentication schemes are based on complex bilinear pairing operations, and the calculation time is too long to be suitable for delay-sensitive 5G-enabled vehicular networks. To address these issues, we propose a reputation system-based lightweight message authentication framework and protocol for 5G-enabled vehicular networks (RSMA). The trusted authority (TA) is in charge of reputation management. A vehicle with a reputation score below the given threshold cannot obtain a credit reference from the TA for participating in the communication; therefore, the number of untrusted messages in vehicular networks is reduced from the source. Security analysis shows that our scheme is secure against an adaptively chosen-message attack, and also satisfies a series of requirements of vehicular networks. The scheme is based on the elliptic curve cryptosystem and supports batch authentication; therefore, it shows better performance in terms of time consumption when compared with related schemes.

Recently, the fog computing concept has been introduced into vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) to formulate fog-based VANETs. Since the communication channels between vehicles and fog nodes are open and insecure, it is necessary to construct an authenticated key agreement (AKA) scheme for securing the channels. The existing AKA schemes have two main deficiencies. One is that the computational and communication overhead are not low enough to satisfy the requirements of delay-sensitive applications. The other is that the multi-trusted-authority (multi-TA) model has not been considered. To solve the deficiencies, we propose a lightweight and conditional privacy-preserving AKA scheme, where the main steps are designed with symmetric cryptography methods. The design can reduce the computational and communication overhead of the AKA process. Additionally, we consider the multi-TA model in the AKA process to solve the single-point-of-failure issue. By integrating Cuckoo filter into the multi-TA model, the secrecy of real identities of legal vehicles is guaranteed and the identity revocation function for illegal vehicles is supported in the AKA process. The security proof and analysis show that our proposed scheme satisfies the essential security and privacy requirements of VANETs. The performance analysis shows that our proposed scheme outperforms other related and represented schemes.