SEMD: Secure and efficient message dissemination with policy enforcement in VANET

• A secure message dissemination scheme with policy enforcement is proposed in VANET network.
• The construction of attribute-based encryption with outsourcing decryption algorithm is given.
• The scheme makes most of the computation cost at the vehicle delegate to the nearest RSU without affecting privacy, which largely eliminates the computation overhead for the vehicle.

Vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is an increasing important paradigm, which not only provides safety enhancement but also improves roadway system efficiency. However, the security issues of data confidentiality, and access control over transmitted messages in VANET have remained to be solved. In this paper, we propose a secure and efficient message dissemination scheme (SEMD) with policy enforcement in VANET, and construct an outsourcing decryption of ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE) to provide differentiated access control services, which makes the vehicles delegate most of the decryption computation to nearest roadside unit (RSU). Performance evaluation demonstrates its efficiency in terms of computational complexity, space complexity, and decryption time. Security proof shows that it is secure against replayable choosen-ciphertext attacks (RCCA) in the standard model.