Security and Privacy of Connected Vehicular Cloud Computing

The articles in this special section focus on vehicular cloud computing platforms (CVCC). As a special cloud computing platform, connected vehicular cloud computing (CVCC), which seamlessly combines cloud computing and VANETs, has been recently proposed to accelerate the adoption of VANETs, and extends the traditional cloud infrastructure consisting of a majority of stationary nodes to the edge of vehicles. CVCC is a mobile computing paradigm that consists of in-motion vehicles cooperating with each other to achieve a bunch of practical applications, such as collaborative package delivery and information dissemination. Essentially, CVCC coordinates the computing, communication, sensing, and storage resources of vehicles on the road to balance the service requirements and hardware limitations. Because of these advantages, CVCC has been regarded as a key basis of future competition and innovation, and has attracted considerable attention from both industry and academia in recent years. Nevertheless, different from the traditional cloud infrastructure, CVCC requires sophisticated security and privacy protection mechanisms as legitimate users and attackers have the same privileges in CVCC.