Efficient attribute based access control mechanism for vehicular ad hoc network

Abstract

In this work, we provide a solution to help mitigate the problem of the large ciphertext size in designing access control mechanism using Attribute Based Encryption (ABE) for vehicular communications. Our approach is to use access policy in Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) enabling the length of ciphertext linear in the number of conjunctions instead of number of attributes in the access policy. This reduces communication overhead in contrast to the existing works in the area. The proposed scheme is computationally efficient as it requires only a constant number of pairings during encryption and decryption. Vehicles can validate their secret attribute-keys obtained from the Central Authority (CA) as well as from an Road Side Unit (RSU) individually. Remarkably, our approach allows vehicles to send multiple messages in a single ciphertext. Our scheme is collusion-resistant, secure under compromised RSUs and is proven to be secure in generic group model. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.