Puncturable Registered ABE for Vehicular Social Networks: Enhancing Security and Practicality

As an emerging class of internet of vehicles, vehicular social networks (VSNs) provide passengers, drivers, and vehicles with extensive data sharing services to improve traffic congestion and road safety. However, the insecure transmissions of shared data may disclose sensitive information, such as private data, location, and driving route. Although attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a promising technology to enable secure data sharing, the existing ABE solutions applied to VSNs encounter three-fold deficiencies: (1) the shared data stored in vehicular cloud server would be leaked in the event of key compromise; (2) relying on one or more fully trusted entities to generate keys for vehicles through secure channels; (3) private information leakage and misbehavior of data user vehicles are neglected. Motivated by these challenges, this paper proposes a puncturable registered ABE scheme called PR-ABE for VSNs with enhanced security and practicality. To be specific, our PR-ABE achieves flexible access control and precise data deletion. The former ensures that only registered vehicles with authorized attributes can obtain the shared data. The latter prevents data disclosure when key compromise happens. Meanwhile, PR-ABE enables vehicles to generate keys independently and eliminates the need for any fully trusted authority. In addition, hidden policy and traceability are fulfilled in PR-ABE to protect private information and deal with malicious vehicles, respectively. Finally, the rigorous security proof and performance evaluation demonstrate that PR-ABE is a practical and efficient solution.