Biblio
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication systems are currently being prepared for real-world deployment, but they face strong opposition over privacy concerns. Position beacon messages are the main culprit, being broadcast in cleartext and pseudonymously signed up to 10 times per second. So far, no practical solutions have been proposed to encrypt or anonymously authenticate V2V messages. We propose two cryptographic innovations that enhance the privacy of V2V communication. As a core contribution, we introduce zone-encryption schemes, where vehicles generate and authentically distribute encryption keys associated to static geographic zones close to their location. Zone encryption provides security against eavesdropping, and, combined with a suitable anonymous authentication scheme, ensures that messages can only be sent by genuine vehicles, while adding only 224 Bytes of cryptographic overhead to each message. Our second contribution is an authentication mechanism fine-tuned to the needs of V2V which allows vehicles to authentically distribute keys, and is called dynamic group signatures with attributes. Our instantiation features unlimited locally generated pseudonyms, negligible credential download-and-storage costs, identity recovery by a trusted authority, and compact signatures of 216 Bytes at a 128-bit security level.
We propose the first verifier-local revocation scheme for privacy-enhancing attribute-based credentials (PABCs) that is practically usable in large-scale applications, such as national eID cards, public transportation and physical access control systems. By using our revocation scheme together with existing PABCs, it is possible to prove attribute ownership in constant time and verify the proof and the revocation status in the time logarithmic in the number of revoked users, independently of the number of all valid users in the system. Proofs can be efficiently generated using only offline constrained devices, such as existing smart-cards. These features are achieved by using a new construction called \$n\$-times unlinkable proofs. We show the full cryptographic description of the scheme, prove its security, discuss parameters influencing scalability and provide details on implementation aspects. As a side result of independent interest, we design a more efficient proof of knowledge of weak Boneh-Boyen signatures, that does not require any pairing computation on the prover side.