A secure billing protocol over attribute-based encryption in vehicular cloud computing

Abstract

The integration of cloud computing into vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) has allowed the possibility of offering multiple services to the vehicle owners ranging from safety to entertainment services. The ubiquitousness of cloud computing involves a multitude of service providers; thus, an efficient and secure access control mechanism is required. However, rigorous security features need to be addressed for such commercial-based services to be fully adopted. In this paper, we present a secure billing protocol over attribute-based encryption in vehicular cloud computing. We achieve the identity privacy of the vehicles and their requested services through pseudonym techniques. Certificateless signature scheme is used to assure the authentication of legitimate vehicles which can enjoy the provided services. We use attribute-based encryption to guarantee access control based on the purchased services. We make use of hash chain technique to provide authorization through electronic voucher (credits) which a vehicle has to possess in order to purchase a service. Unlike existing protocols in VANETS, the proposed protocol is not built on expensive bilinear pairing operations. We provide the efficiency of the proposed protocol through performance analysis and simulation.