Group signature is one of the well-known cryptographic primitives for anonymous authentication which is the fundamental requirement for securing vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), but it is prone to cause huge revocation overhead in VANETs with millions of nodes and serious security risk. To solve this problem, we develop an efficient distributed key management scheme (DKM) where the whole domain of VANET is divided into several sub-regions, and any vehicle has to update its group secret key periodically from the regional group manager who manages the region where the vehicle stays. Unlike the previously reported works, DKM prevents vehicles from leaking the value of the updated group secret key to the regional group manager during the group key updating process. Subsequently, it is capable of identifying either the compromised regional authorities or the malicious vehicles. Moreover, performance analysis demonstrates that DKM can reduce the revocation cost significantly while the communication cost for key updating is small.In this part, we compare Hao's scheme with DKM in terms of communication cost for key updating, which is an important performance metric in wireless network. We consider the implementation of Tate pairing on an MNT curve [22] with embedding degree 6, where G is represented by 161 bits, and the order q is represented by 160 bits. The communication efficient short signature approach [20], is supposed to be used in Hao's scheme. Table IV show the communication results of Hao's scheme and DKM. Obviously, DKM performs better than Hao's scheme on both of communication turns and communication exchanged information.
CONCLUSIONThe proposed DKM provides distributed key management for group-signature based authentication in VANET, which can decrease the revocation checking cost significantly. Security Comm. Networks 2012; 5:79-86