Secure Emergency Services Protocol over Vehicular Cloud Computing

Abstract

Natural disasters such as typhoon or earthquake requires an efficient disaster rescue system in order
to minimize the losses. Vehicular cloud Computing (VCC) which integrates cloud computing within
the vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) offers a suitable platform especially for disaster assistance
and rescue teams (DART) which use vehicles to reach the disaster locations. Current protocols
for disaster services cover the assignment of rescue mission to the vehicles heading to the disaster
scenes. However, some disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis can repeatedly happen within a
short interval, requiring the disaster documents to be updated continuously for better rescue services.
In this paper we present a secure protocol for emergency services over vehicular cloud computing
which enables the DART vehicles to access disaster scenes and have updated information of disaster
scenes during their activities. The proposed protocol is not based on bilinear operations unlike
the existing secure rescue services. We make use of linear secret sharing scheme (LSSS) coupled
with attribute based encryption (ABE), geo-encryption and ID-based signature to guarantee the security
objectives. We verify the efficiency of the proposed protocol through performance evaluations.