Nowadays, with rapid advancements of vehicular telematics and communication techniques, proliferation of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have been witnessed, which facilitates the construction of promising intelligent transportation system (ITS). Due to inherent wireless communicating features in open environment, secure transmission among numerous VANET entities remains crucial issues. Currently, lots of research efforts have been made, while most of which tend to allocate the universal group key to the verified devices for both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-RSU (V2R) communications. However, in heterogeneous VANET environment with large numbers of devices in same vehicular group, complicated and variable topologies lead to continuous key updating in every moment, causing interference to regular V2R data exchange, which is not reliable and efficient for resource-constrained VANET environment. Moreover, group membership recording and detecting mechanisms are necessary for real time vehicle revocation and participation, which has not been further studied so far. In this paper, we address the above issues by proposing a secure authentication and key management scheme. In our design, novel VANET system model with edge computing infrastructure is adopted so as to offer adequate computing and storing capacity compared to traditional VANET structure. Note that our certificateless authentication scheme applies the independent session key for each vehicle for interference avoidance. Furthermore, consortium blockchain is employed for V2V group key construction. Real time group membership arrangement with efficient group key updating is accordingly provided. Formal security proofs are presented, demonstrating that the proposed scheme can achieve desired security properties. Performance analysis is conducted as well, proving that the proposed scheme is efficient compared with the state-of-the-arts.

As a crucial component of Internet‐of‐Thing (IoT), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have attracted increasing attentions from both academia and industry fields in recent years. With the extensive VANETs deployment in transportation systems of more and more countries, drivers’ driving experience can be drastically improved. In this case, the real‐time road information needs to be disseminated to the correlated vehicles. However, due to inherent wireless communicating characteristics of VANETs, authentication and group key management strategies are indispensable for security assurance. Furthermore, effective road message dissemination mechanism is of significance. In this paper, we address the above problems by developing a certificateless authentication and road message dissemination protocol. In our design, certificateless signature and the relevant feedback mechanism are adopted for authentication and group key distribution. Subsequently, message evaluating and ranking strategy is introduced. Security analysis shows that our protocol achieves desirable security properties. Additionally, performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient compared with the state of the art.

The wireless body area network (WBAN) is considered as one of the emerging wireless techniques in the healthcare system. Typical WBAN sensors, especially implantable sensors, have limited power capability, which restricts their wide applications in the medical environment. In addition, it is necessary for the healthcare center (HC) to broadcast significant notifications to different patient groups. Considering the above issues, in this paper, the novel practical WBAN system model with group message broadcasting is built. Subsequently, a secure and efficient group key management protocol with cooperative sensor association is proposed. In the proposed protocol, the Chinese remainder theorem (CRT) is employed for group key management between HC and the personal controller (PC), which also supports batch key updating. The proposed sensor association scheme is motivated by coded cooperative data exchange (CCDE). The formal security proofs are presented, indicating that the proposed protocol can achieve the desired security properties. Moreover, performance analysis demonstrates that the proposed protocol is efficient compared with state-of-the-art group key management protocols.

Emerging as the effective strategy of intelligent transportation system (ITS), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have the capacity of drastically improving the driving experience and road safety. In typical VANET scenarios, high mobility and volatility of vehicles result in dynamic topology of vehicular networks. That is, individual vehicle may pass through the effective domain of multiple neighboring road-side-units (RSUs) during a comparatively short time interval. Hence, efficient and low-latency cross-domain verification with all the successive RSUs is of significance. Recently, a lot of research on VANET authentication and key distribution was presented, while the critical cross-domain authentication (CDA) issue has not been properly addressed. Particularly, the existing CDA solutions mainly reply on the acquired confidential keying information from the neighboring entities (RSUs and vehicles), while too much trustworthiness is granted to the involved RSUs. Please note that the RSUs are distributively located and may be compromised or disabled by adversary, thus vital vehicle information may be revealed. Furthermore, frequent data interactions between RSUs and cloud server are always the major requisite so as to achieve mutual authentication with cross-domain vehicles, which leads to heavy bandwidth consumption and high latency. In this paper, we address the above VANET cross-domain authentication issue under the novel RSU edge networks assumption. Please note that RSUs are assumed to be semi-trustworthy entity in our design, where critical vehicular keying messages remain secrecy. Homomorphic encryption design is applied for all involved RSUs and vehicles. In this way, successive RSUs could efficiently verify the cross-domain vehicle with the transited certificate from the neighbor RSUs and vehicle itself, while the identity and secrets of each vehicle is hidden all the time. Afterwards, dynamic updating towards the anonymous vehicle identity is conducted upon validation, where conditional privacy preserving is available. Moreover, pairing-free mutual authentication method is used for efficiency consideration. Formal security analysis is given, proving that the HCDA mechanism yields desirable security properties on VANET cross domain authentication issue. Performance discussions demonstrate efficiency of the proposed HCDA scheme compared with the state-of-the-art.

Currently, the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic has caused catastrophic effect on every aspect of our lives, globally. The entire human race of all countries and regions has suffered devastating losses. With its high infectiousness and mortality rate, it is of great significance to carry out effective precautions and prevention of COVID-19. Specifically, the transportation system has been confirmed as one of the crucial spreading routes. Hence, enhancing healthcare monitoring and infection tracking for high-mobility transportation system is infeasible for pandemic control. Meanwhile, due to the promising advantages in the emerging intelligent transportation system (ITS), vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) is able to collect and process relevant vehicular data for improving the driving experience and road safety, which provide a way for non-contact automatic healthcare monitoring. Furthermore, the proliferating cloud computing and blockchain techniques enable sufficient processing and storing capabilities, along with decentralized remote auditing towards heterogenous vehicular data. In this case, the automated infection tracking for pandemic control could be achieved accordingly. For the above consideration, in this paper we develop a practical homomorphic authentication scheme for cloud-assisted VANETs, where the healthcare monitoring for all involving passengers is provided. Notably, the integrated cloud-assisted VANET infrastructure is utilized, where the hybrid medical data acquisition module is attached. In this way, timely, non-contact measurement on all passengers’ physical status can be remotely done by vehicular cloud (VC), which could also drastically improve the efficiency and guarantee safety. Vulnerabilities of the employed dedicated-short-range-communication (DSRC) technique could be properly addressed with the applied homomorphic encryption design. Additionally, the decentralized blockchain-based vehicle recording mechanism is cooperatively performed by VC and edge units. Infection tracking on specific vehicle and individual can be offered in this way. Each signature sequence is collaboratively maintained and verified by the current roadside unit (RSU) and its neighbor RSUs. The security analysis demonstrates that the proposed scheme is secure against major attacks, while the performance comparison with the state-of-the-arts relevant methods are presented for efficiency discussion.