With the progress in wireless communication technology and the increasing number of vehicles, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become essential for improving road conditions and enhancing driving experience. The core of the VANETs is the communication between different vehicles, and the security of the communication is based on message authentication. Several schemes have been designed to enhance the efficiency of message authentication. However, these schemes have the disadvantage of redundant authentication, i.e., repeated authentication of the same message, and fail to seek invalid messages from the batch of messages. To solve these problems, this paper introduces a novel edge-computing concept into the message-authentication process of VANETs. In our scheme, the roadside unit can efficiently authenticate messages from nearby vehicles and broadcast the authentication results to the vehicles within its communication range, thereby reducing redundant authentication and enhancing the efficiency of the entire system. The security analysis results show that the proposed scheme satisfies the security requirements of the VANETs. The performance analysis results show that the proposed scheme can not only work well in an ideal environment where the attacker is absent but also capable of quickly identifying valid and invalid messages even if the VANET is attacked.

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.

The large amount of driving data can help intelligent vehicles make decisions to drive safely, improve vehicular services and enhance driving experience. In traditional vehicular networks, data sharing needs to be done with roadside units (RSUs). However, RSUs cannot be entirely trusted and the data stored in the RSUs may be tampered with. In addition, the deployment of RSUs along roads consumes a large amount of social resources. Further, data sharing between vehicles lacks a trusted environment, and vehicles may be unwilling to share data with others because of data security and privacy concerns. Moreover, in the event of unauthorized data sharing, the source of the leaked data is difficult to trace. In this study, we exploit consortium blockchain technology to achieve traceable and anonymous vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) data sharing, effectively preventing second-hand sharing of data. The combination of 5G and blockchain makes it possible to share data without using RSUs. We design an enhanced delegated proof-of-stake consensus algorithm to make it more suitable for applications in the distributed Internet of Vehicles (IoV). A comprehensive analysis shows that the proposed scheme is secure and efficient.

Owing to the development of wireless communication technology and the increasing number of automobiles, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have become essential tools to secure traffic safety and enhance driving convenience. It is necessary to design a conditional privacy-preserving authentication (CPPA) scheme for VANETs because of their vulnerability and security requirements. Traditional CPPA schemes have two deficiencies. One is that the communication or storage overhead is not sufficiently low, but the traffic emergency message requires an ultra-low transmission delay. The other is that traditional CPPA schemes do not consider updating the system secret key (SSK), which is stored in an unhackable Tamper Proof Device (TPD), whereas side-channel attack methods and the wide usage of the SSK increase the probability of breaking the SSK. To solve the first issue, we propose a CPPA signature scheme based on elliptic curve cryptography, which can achieve message recovery and be reduced to elliptic curve discrete logarithm assumption, so that traffic emergency messages are secured with ultra-low communication overhead. To solve the second issue, we design an SSK updating algorithm, which is constructed on Shamir’s secret sharing algorithm and secure pseudo random function, so that the TPDs of unrevoked vehicles can update SSK securely. Formal security proof and analysis show that our proposed scheme satisfies the security and privacy requirements of VANETs. Performance analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme requires less storage size and has a lower transmission delay 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.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are vulnerable to many kinds of security attacks, so it is necessary to design an authenticated key agreement (AKA) scheme for securing communication channels in VANETs. Existing AKA schemes in VANETs have not provided an efficient and secure method to secure V2V and V2I communications simultaneously while meeting the necessary security and privacy requirements. Further, few key updating mechanisms, which are secure, conditional privacy-preserving, practical, and lightweight, exist in current VANETs AKA schemes. In this paper, we propose a proven secure AKA scheme for securing V2V and V2I communications in VANETs, which can be divided into two parts. The first part is a three-party authentication process in which vehicles, road side unit (RSU), and trust authority (TA) authenticate each other. The second part is the key agreement process, which is used in the key generation and updating processes. For this phase, we design a tree-based key agreement algorithm that considers two scenarios, i.e., the joining of an authenticated vehicle and the leaving of the vehicle. The formal security proof and the security analysis show that our proposed scheme satisfies session key security and the necessary security requirements in VANETs, respectively. The performance analysis demonstrates that our proposed scheme has an advantage over several representative AKA schemes in VANETs.