Registration-Based Bilateral Fine-Grained Access Control in Vehicular Social Networks

Vehicular social networks (VSNs), as an innovative mobile communication system, significantly enhance the driving experience and improve urban traffic management efficiency. To address the privacy issues that arise from the use of public channels in VSNs, fine-grained access control (AC) should be ensured. Nevertheless, existing schemes still face some practical challenges in the aspects of data source identification, key escrow, and dynamic vehicle management. Therefore, this article proposes a registration-based bilateral fine-grained AC scheme (RBF-AC) in VSNs. Specifically, RBF-AC allows service providers (SPs) to select target vehicles and offer tailored services, while allowing vehicles to identify the most suitable SPs based on their needs, and all of which are realized in a fine-grained level. Meanwhile, SPs and vehicles are capable of locally generating their own private and public keys without relying on any fully trusted authority. RBF-AC also keeps high flexibility and enables the vehicles to join, leave and update their attributes in a dynamic manner. Additionally, outsourced verification and decryption are provided to minimize the computation cost for vehicles. We present formal security proofs to validate the security of RFB-AC. The performance evaluation illustrates the practical applicability of RBF-AC in VSNs.