2.3 Related Work
Some progress on vehicular communication has al-
ready been achieved and presented in the literature.
Wen-Bing et al. (Horng et al., 2012) proposed a novel
group communication scheme for vehicular networks,
in which a group is formed by a set of related ve-
hicles having the same destination, such as a group
of recreational vehicles traveling to the same tourist
spot. Choi et al. (Choi and Jung, 2009) proposed a
security framework with strong non-repudiation and
privacy properties using a new approach constituting
an ID-based cryptosystem in VANETs.
Goyal et al. (Goyal et al., 2006) developed a new
cryptosystem for fine-grained sharing of encrypted
data, called key-policy attribute-based encryption, in
which ciphertexts are labeled with sets of attributes
and private keys are associated with access structures
that controlwhich ciphertextsa user is able to decrypt.
Liu et al. (Liu et al., 2016) proposed a communication
model for VANETs by extending CP-ABE (Bethen-
court et al., 2007) with a hierarchical structure of mul-
tiple authorities to achieve fine-grained access control
of the transmitted messages.
In the methods in most previous studies, every
vehicle needs authentication before communication
is allowed. Some methods search for a third party
to record every vehicle serially before communica-
tion; however, these methods are not practical, since
the number of vehicles is very large, and they lack
the required flexibility given that one vehicle may
meet many other vehicles that have not previously
appeared. Some methods are based on IKE, which
suffers problems related to the high mobility and fre-
quent topology changes in VANETs.
In this paper, we propose SNB-PPB to provide
better information exchange security in vehicular
communications. We use the relations between ve-
hicle drivers on social networks to assist the authen-
tication and use social network attributes to facilitate
the encryption procedure. The method omits the key
exchange procedure, which needs stable communica-
tion, and therefore it can be effective in a VANET.
3 MODELS
3.1 Preliminary Knowledge
3.1.1 Trust Evaluation Model
Like human beings, vehicles need to send messages
having varying degrees of importance: some are “very
important,” some are “normally important,” and some
may be “not important.” Correspondingly, it is ex-
pected that “very important” messages will be made
known only to “very trusted vehicles and “normally
important” messages to “very trusted” and “normally
trusted” vehicles. Therefore, we propose a trust eval-
uation model to evaluate the extent to which one ve-
hicle can trust another in a VANET.
In social networks, users havemany “friends” who
deserve trust. Then, these friends’ friends also de-
serve trust; however, an attenuation in trust will ex-
ist. Thus, trust is disseminated among the social net-
work nodes and an attenuation in trust exists during
dissemination. We used this idea to create our trust
evaluation model. In our model, we use trust levels
to describe the concept “trust” and for simplicity con-
sider the trust attenuation during dissemination to be
linear. Each vehicle has a social network account and
when the distance from B to A in a social network
grows by one degree, B’s trust level for A grows by
one degree. When vehicle A is running on the road,
there are many other vehicles nearby, e.g., B. If A is
B’s x-Hops neighbor, B is in trust level x for A. Thus,
all vehicles can be divided into different trust levels
for A.
3.1.2 Ciphertext-policy Attribute-based
Encryption Model
Access structure T. Usually, a tree with root R is used
to represent an access structure. Each non-leaf node
of the tree represents a threshold gate, described by
its children and a threshold value. If num(x) is the
number of children of a node x and k
x
is its threshold
value, then 0 < k
x
≤ num(x). When k
x
= 1, the thresh-
old gate is an OR gate and when k
x
= num(x) it is an
AND gate. Each leaf node x of the tree is described
by an attribute and a threshold value k
x
= 1. The par-
ent of the node x in the tree is denoted by parent(x).
The function att(x) is defined only if x is a leaf node
and denotes the attribute associated with the leaf node
x in the tree. The access tree T also defines an order-
ing between the children of every node; that is, the
children of a node are numbered from 1 to num. The
function index(x) returns such a number associated
with the node x, where the index values are uniquely
assigned to nodes in the access structure for a given
key in an arbitrary manner.
Satisfying the access tree. Let T be an access tree
with root R. Denote by T
x
the subtree of T rooted at
the node x. Then, T is the same as T
R
. If a set of
attributes γ satisfies the access tree T
x
, it is denoted by
T
x
(γ) = 1. T
x
(γ) is computed recursively as follows. If
x is a non-leaf node, T
x
′
(γ) is evaluated for all children
x
′
of node x. T
x
(γ) returns 1 if and only if at least k
x