Secure Emergency Services Protocol over Vehicular Cloud Computing

Natural disasters such as typhoon or earthquake requires an efficient disaster rescue system in orderto minimize the losses. Vehicular cloud Computing (VCC) which integrates cloud computing withinthe vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) offers a suitable platform especially for disaster assistanceand rescue teams (DART) which use vehicles to reach the disaster locations. Current protocolsfor disaster services cover the assignment of rescue mission to the vehicles heading to the disasterscenes. However, some disasters such as earthquakes and tsunamis can repeatedly happen within ashort 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 computingwhich enables the DART vehicles to access disaster scenes and have updated information of disasterscenes during their activities. The proposed protocol is not based on bilinear operations unlikethe existing secure rescue services. We make use of linear secret sharing scheme (LSSS) coupledwith attribute based encryption (ABE), geo-encryption and ID-based signature to guarantee the securityobjectives. We verify the efficiency of the proposed protocol through performance evaluations.