Efficient Offline/Online Heterogeneous-Aggregated Signcryption Protocol for Edge Computing-Based Internet of Vehicles

The Internet of Vehicles (IoV), which is an extension of traditional vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), ensures the provision of safe and efficient vehicular communications. However, the burgeoning IoV faces several challenges in terms of traffic information security and vehicle identity privacy during wireless transmission. Generally, vehicles move faster on the highway necessitating the use of reliable technology to communicate with infrastructure on the roadside efficiently and securely. Lately, researchers have proposed several different message dissemination methods for vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications. However, they suffer from different concerns (i.e., security weaknesses, computationally heavy, and high communication/storage overhead); therefore, they are unreliable for delay-sensitive communications. To cope with this, we come up with an enhanced certificateless and identity-based offline/online heterogeneous signcryption (CIOOHSC) protocol for V2I communications in edge computing-based IoV to simultaneously achieve confidentiality, integrity, authentication, non-repudiation, and identity anonymity in a logically single step. The CIOOHSC protocol allows a vehicle in certificateless cryptography to transmit a message to an edge node in identity-based cryptography. In the online phase, there are no point multiplication operations as they are already carried out in the offline phase. This reduces the computational load considerably in the online phase. Furthermore, our protocol enables the edge node to aggregate multiple messages and process them simultaneously to boost performance. The CIOOHSC protocol's security is proved in the random oracle model under the hard problems' assumptions. Our protocol outperforms recent similar schemes in terms of computational complexity, communication/storage overhead, and average transmission delay, according to the performance evaluation findings.