Expedite Privacy-Preserving Emergency Communication Scheme for VANETs

The existing communication schemes are often unusable in natural disasters and public emergencies. But requirements of information collection and data transmission in emergency scenario are very imperative. Thus, sensor networks ad hoc networks are required in the emergency communication systems. For example, rescue vehicles equipped with wireless communication devices, sensors, and cameras are regularly used to collect and transmit the real-time information for the rescue action. The paper focuses on security solutions for the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in the emergency communication cases, in which the communication infrastructures are not always available. An expedite privacy-preserving emergency communication (EPEC) scheme is presented for the vehicles to securely connect with the others in the neighbor area even when the trusted infrastructures are destroyed by the disaster. EPEC satisfies conditional privacy preservation requirements, in which both lightweight signature and batch verification are employed to provide efficiency. We also show the proof of the security, feasibility, and efficiency of our EPEC by the theoretical and experimental analyses.