Secure Channel Establishment Scheme for Task Delivery in Vehicular Cloud Computing

Vehicular cloud computing (VCC) is a network architecture that allows a group of entities (i.e., vehicles/roadside infrastructures) to share their resources with other entities. Task delivery in VCC involves the delegation of computation/storage task from a cloud user to some or all the cloud members within a vehicular cloud (VC) for processing. This process inevitably raises concerns regarding how to protect the confidentiality of the task content and the privacy of vehicles. To tackle these challenges, the establishment of a secure channel for task delivery becomes essential. However, the existing secure channel establishment schemes for task delivery in VCC suffer from a few problems including the reliance on a trusted dealer, sender restriction, recipient un-flexibility, or the ignorance of recipient privacy. In this paper, we propose a novel secure channel establishment scheme for task delivery in VCC. It allows a group of entities close to each other to form a VC dynamically without a trusted dealer and allows any entity to be a cloud user who can flexibly select favorable cloud members within a VC to handle its task. The secure channel established by our scheme not only protects the confidentiality of the content of the task but also the privacy of vehicles. Formal security analysis and simulation validate the security and efficiency of our scheme.