Attribute-Based Access Control for Vehicular Edge Cloud Computing

Edge computing provides a new platform to support real-time connected vehicle applications. One of the challenges is to ensure communication security among vehicles, roadside devices, and edge servers, while addressing group communication nature and fast changing group membership. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a secure communication scheme for vehicular edge computing applications based on decentralized attribute-based encryption (ABE), which provides flexible data encryption and access control according to attribute-based policies, without requirement for knowing the recipient identities and establishment of a secure communication channel between the sender and recipient. Key-policy ABE and ciphertext-policy ABE are employed to collect sensed data for process and disseminate processed results to the involved entities, respectively. The communication protocols are designed and an experimental prototype considering an edge cloud-assisted collision warning application is implemented for proof of the concept. The evaluation results show that the proposed ABE-based scheme is efficient and feasible.