EFSC: Efficient and Forward-Secure Conditional Privacy-Preserving Scheme for Internet of Vehicles

The interconnected environment of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) facilitates the development of various low-carbon and secure location-based services. However, sharing data with semi-trusted service providers poses serious security risks. In particular, it can threaten the confidentiality of past messages after the leakage of the user’s key. In this article, we propose an efficient and forward-secure conditional privacy-preserving scheme for IoV, namely, EFSC. We construct a cryptographic method with forward secrecy in the proposed EFSC scheme, which ensures the confidentiality of past messages even after the user’s secret key has been compromised. This method incorporates key derivation functionality and efficiently addresses the complex certificate management issue with the assistance of smart contracts. Additionally, the designed smart contract facilitates authentication. We analyze and prove that the proposed EFSC scheme satisfies the proposed privacy and security requirements with better security performance. We use Goerli, an Ethernet test network, to deploy customized smart contracts to prove its feasibility. Furthermore, the proposed EFSC scheme exhibits high-index generation and pairing efficiency and realizes less computational and communication overhead. Compared with the existing schemes, its computational overhead in message signing, signature verification, and user revocation can be reduced by up to 95.61%, 36.53%, and 67.01%, respectively. Moreover, the communication overhead for initiating a location service query is only 0.3760 kB. These results show that the proposed EFSC scheme has certain advantages regarding efficiency and security.