Puncturable Signature and Applications in Privacy-Aware Data Reporting for VDTNs

In vehicular digital twin networks (VDTNs), digital twin (DT) can assist the vehicle in data handling and report traffic data to the management server, thereby providing enhanced and scalable services for intelligent transport systems. However, the reported data may suffer from forgery and eavesdropping attacks due to the transmission on the open channel. In addition, a critical threat in VDTNs is the physical vehicle capture attack, namely, an adversary is capable of compromising the vehicle to obtain the current secret key, which can break the reliability of historical reported data and make the services provided by DT unavailable. Puncturable signature (PS) is a promising solution to eliminate these concerns, despite that the existing PS constructions have non-negligible false-positive errors and impose a significant cost on practical deployments. In this article, we design a novel PS and apply it to privacy-aware data reporting protocol (PA-DRP) for VDTNs. Specifically, the designed PS adopts a derivation-based way to achieve puncturing functionality, which is free from false-positive errors while extremely reducing the storage overhead of the secret keys. Meanwhile, we employ the designed PS to construct PA-DRP that enjoys authentication and forward security. Additionally, PA-DRP not only allows DT to remove privacy-sensitive information from the signed data but also provides fuzzy identity for protecting the real identity of the vehicle. Furthermore, the security analysis and performance evaluation demonstrate that the designed PS and PA-DRP not only can withstand various security and privacy assaults for VDTNs but also are efficient and practical.