Ensuring End-to-End Security With Fine-Grained Access Control for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

As advanced V2X applications emerge in the connected and autonomous vehicle (CAV), the data communications between in-vehicle end-devices and outside nodes increase, which make the end-to-end (E2E) security to in-vehicle end-devices as the urgent issue to be handled. However, the E2E security with fine-grained access control still remains as a challenging issue for resource-constrained end-devices since the existing security solutions require complicated key management and high resource consumption. Therefore, this paper proposes a practical and secure vehicular communication protocol for the E2E security based on a new attribute-based encryption (ABE) scheme. In the ABE scheme, the outsourced computation is provided for encryption, and the computation cost for decryption constantly remains small, regardless of the number of attributes. The policy privacy can be ensured by the proposed ABE to support privacy-sensitive V2X applications, and the existing identity-based signature for outsourced signing is newly reconstructed. The protocol achieves the confidentiality, message authentication, identity anonymity, unlinkability, traceability, and reconfigurable outsourced computation, and this paper also shows the practical feasibility of the protocol via the performance evaluation.