ABACS: An Attribute-Based Access Control System for Emergency Services over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we propose an Attribute-Based Access Control System (ABACS) for emergency services with security assurance over Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs). ABACS aims to improve the efficiency of rescues mobilized via emergency communications over VANETs. By adopting fuzzy identity-based encryption, ABACS can select the emergency vehicles that can most appropriately deal with an emergency and securely delegate the authority to control traffic facilities to the assigned emergency vehicles. Using novel cryptographic preliminaries, ABACS realizes confidentiality of messages, prevention of collusion attacks, and fine-grained access control. As compared to the current PKI scheme, the computational delay and transmission overhead can be reduced by exploiting the advantages afforded by message broadcasting, which is heavily used in ABACS. The performance evaluation demonstrates that ABACS is a suitable candidate for realizing emergency services via VANETs.