ECCHSC: Computationally and Bandwidth Efficient ECC-Based Hybrid Signcryption Protocol for Secure Heterogeneous Vehicle-to-Infrastructure Communications

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), an application of the Internet of Things (IoT) providing a better intelligent transportation system (ITS), has received substantial attention from both industry and academia. Heterogeneous vehicular communications in VANETs occur when both vehicles and the infrastructure use different cryptographic technologies to exchange safety messages. However, the safety messages between vehicles and the infrastructure are communicated wirelessly; therefore, security issues are a serious concern in this domain. The existing schemes secure the transmission of safety messages with respect to confidentiality, authentication, and nonrepudiation. However, they are inappropriate with respect to efficiency. They cause computational overhead on the receiver and bandwidth overhead in the communications. To cope with this, we propose an elliptic curve cryptosystem-based hybrid signcryption (ECCHSC) protocol that satisfies the security requirements (i.e., message confidentiality, message’s source authentication, message integrity, nonrepudiation, and identity–anonymity) for heterogeneous vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications in a single logical step. This protocol allows secure transmission of a safety message from a vehicle using identity-based cryptography (IDC) to a roadside unit (RSU) using public-key infrastructure (PKI). In addition, the ECCHSC protocol enables the RSU to receive multiple ciphertexts, aggregate them, and de-signcrypt them simultaneously through the batch de-signcryption method, which further improves the performance. The ECCHSC protocol has indistinguishability against adaptive chosen ciphertext attacks (IND-CCA2) and existential unforgeability against adaptive chosen message attacks (EUF-CMAs) in the random oracle model (ROM). The performance analysis of our protocol demonstrates a significant reduction in computational overhead and in communication/storage overhead as compared to the state-of-the-art schemes.