Efficient Privacy Preserving Anonymous Authentication Announcement Protocol for Secure Vehicular Cloud Network

In a Vehicular Cloud (VC) network, an announcement protocol plays a critical role in promoting safety and efficiency by enabling vehicles to disseminate safety-related messages. The reliability of message exchange is essential for improving traffic safety and road conditions. However, verifying the message authenticity could lead to the potential compromise of vehicle privacy, presenting a significant security challenge in the VC network. In contrast, if any misbehavior occurs, the accountable vehicle must be identifiable and removed from the network to ensure public safety. Addressing this conflict between message reliability and privacy requires a secure protocol that satisfies accountability properties while preserving user privacy. This paper presents a novel announcement protocol for secure communication in VC networks that utilizes group signature to achieve seemingly contradictory goals of reliability, privacy, and accountability. We have developed the first comprehensive announcement protocol for VC using group signature, which has been shown to improve the performance efficiency and feasibility of the VC network through performance analysis and simulation results.