PAACP: A portable privacy-preserving authentication and access control protocol in vehicular ad hoc networks

Recently, several studies addressed security and privacy issues in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Most of them focused on safety applications. As VANETs will be available widely, it is anticipated that Internet services could be accessed through VANETs in the near future. Thus, non-safety applications for VANETs would rise in popularity. This paper proposes a novel portable privacy-preserving authentication and access control protocol, named PAACP, for non-safety applications in VANETs. In addition to the essential support of authentication, key establishment, and privacy preservation, PAACP is developed to provide sophisticated differentiated service access control, which will facilitate the deployment of a variety of non-safety applications. Besides, the portability feature of PAACP can eliminate the backend communications with service providers. Therefore, better performance and scalability can be achieved in PAACP.