An efficient certificateless ring signcryption scheme with conditional privacy-preserving in VANETs

As an ever-increasing ingredient of intelligent transportation systems, vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) can be leveraged to improve road safety and driving convenience. However, the extreme mobility and volatility of VANETs can arouse serious concerns about vehicle identity privacy leakages as well as the authenticity and confidentiality of safety messages in vehicular communication. To cope with these issues, we propose a certificateless ring signcryption scheme with conditional privacy-preserving based on elliptic curve cryptography, which can provide secure vehicular communication with low transmission latency and communication overhead. Besides, by integrating a tracking mark into the safety message, we design a tracking algorithm that enables the trusted party to distinguish malicious vehicles from the ring member list. It realizes conditional privacy while avoiding the huge cost of vehicular storage resources. Through security analysis, this scheme is proven to be secure under the Elliptic curve discrete logarithm and Elliptic curve computational Diffie–Hellman assumptions in the random oracle model. Finally, we implement the performance evaluations in terms of the computational overhead, the communication bandwidth and the packet loss rate. By utilizing the MIRACL cryptography library and the Veins simulation framework, the results illustrate that the proposed scheme can support an efficient and highly reliable communication protocol for safety-related applications in VANETs environment.