The interconnected environment of the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) facilitates the development of various low-carbon and secure location-based services. However, sharing data with semi-trusted service providers poses serious security risks. In particular, it can threaten the confidentiality of past messages after the leakage of the user’s key. In this article, we propose an efficient and forward-secure conditional privacy-preserving scheme for IoV, namely, EFSC. We construct a cryptographic method with forward secrecy in the proposed EFSC scheme, which ensures the confidentiality of past messages even after the user’s secret key has been compromised. This method incorporates key derivation functionality and efficiently addresses the complex certificate management issue with the assistance of smart contracts. Additionally, the designed smart contract facilitates authentication. We analyze and prove that the proposed EFSC scheme satisfies the proposed privacy and security requirements with better security performance. We use Goerli, an Ethernet test network, to deploy customized smart contracts to prove its feasibility. Furthermore, the proposed EFSC scheme exhibits high-index generation and pairing efficiency and realizes less computational and communication overhead. Compared with the existing schemes, its computational overhead in message signing, signature verification, and user revocation can be reduced by up to 95.61%, 36.53%, and 67.01%, respectively. Moreover, the communication overhead for initiating a location service query is only 0.3760 kB. These results show that the proposed EFSC scheme has certain advantages regarding efficiency and security.

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) establish wireless connections among all vehicles, enabling seamless mobile communication. However, existing conditional privacy protection VANETs authentication schemes fail to address the issue of potential key-exposure and do not provide accelerated vehicle authentication. In this paper, we propose a reputation incentive committee-based secure conditional dual authentication scheme for VANETs called RIC-SDA. Our proposed scheme incorporates dual authentication of the consensus committee and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. It enables the rapid provision of dynamic vehicle epoch-key from consensus committee authentication for V2V authentication through our designed reputation incentive mechanism. To mitigate the potential key-exposure problem, we introduce a novel concept of secure vehicle epoch communication, which means V2V authentication is valid for only one epoch blockchain unit time. The proposed scheme achieves lightweight computation and incurs minimal communication overheads, with the signature size being just 137 bytes. The RIC-SDA scheme supports fast batch verification. We prove that our proposed scheme is unforgeable security under random oracle and demonstrate its feasibility by implementing it in a test network based on Ethereum Sepolia. The results demonstrate that our RIC-SDA solution outperforms the existing state-of-the-art authentication VANET schemes regarding efficiency and communication costs.

With the development of new-generation mobile communication technology, the Internet of Vehicles is playing an increasingly important role in people’s lives. However, the sensitive information contained in its “data fingerprinting” raises many privacy and security concerns. To better protect the location privacy of users on the Internet of Vehicles, this article proposes a collaborative service-based privacy protection scheme for the Internet of Vehicles. In this scheme, each requesting user first initiates a location service query by generating a pairing index of the location points set. Then a customized pairing result threshold is used to determine the collaborating users that can participate in the service response. And in the process, the location privacy of users is secured by location point generalization and encryption. In addition, redundant location service recommendations are eliminated by the proposed repeatability tests. Security analysis and experiments show that this scheme has good performance and anti-privacy leakages, forgery attacks, collusion attacks, etc.