An Anonymous Communication Scheme based on Ring Signature in VANETs
This addresses the need for secure, efficient, and infrastructure-independent anonymous communication in VANETs, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling anonymous communication in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) by introducing a scheme based on a certificateless ring signature, which reduces signature length and simplifies key management, with computation overhead close to normal signatures and a small-scale implementation demonstrating availability.
Vehicular ad hoc networks allow vehicles to connect themselves as networks so that cars could communicate with each other. This paper introduces an anonymous communication scheme providing integrity protection, multi-level privacy and auditability. The scheme is based on a certificateless ring signature proposed in this paper, which is contributed to reduce the length of the signature and simplify the key management. In our scheme, vehicles can compose the anonymous group without the help of road-side infrastructure or central authority. The computation overhead is close to a normal signature scheme, so it is efficient in most application scenarios. We also present a small-scale implementation to show the availability of the prototype system.