Vehicle sensor networks (VSN) play an increasingly important part in smart city, due to the interconnectivity of the infrastructure. However similar to other wireless communications, vehicle sensor networks are susceptible to a broad range of attacks. In addition to ensuring security for both data-at-rest and data-in-transit, it is essential to preserve the privacy of data and users in vehicle sensor networks. Many existing authentication schemes for vehicle sensor networks are generally not designed to also preserve the privacy between the user and service provider (e.g., mining user data to provide personalized services without infringing on user privacy). Controllable linkability can be used to facilitate an involved entity with the right linking key to determine whether two messages were generated by the same sender, while preserving the anonymity of the signer. Such a functionality is very useful to provide personalized services. Thus, in this paper, a threshold authentication scheme with anonymity and controllable linkability for vehicle sensor networks is constructed, and its security is analyzed under the random oracle model.

Threshold authentication; controllable linkabilty; group signature; vehicle sensor networks