A Message Privacy Protection Scheme for Vehicular Social Networks Based on Improved Signcryption Technology

ABSTRACT The Vehicular Social Network (VSN) enables convenient interactions through its unique social characteristics, but simultaneously faces critical security threats—including privacy leakage, malicious information propagation, and social engineering attacks—that endanger system security and compromise user interests. Existing privacy‐preserving schemes exhibit substantial limitations in dynamic VSN environments, as they struggle to simultaneously ensure strong security, real‐time responsiveness, and efficient resource utilization. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes an efficient and reliable message privacy protection scheme leveraging signcryption technology. The scheme restructures the signcryption process into two distinct phases—offline and online—for enhanced efficiency. During the offline phase, the majority of computations are pre‐processed without requiring the actual message content or recipient identity. In the online phase, ciphertexts are assembled rapidly with minimal computational overhead, substantially improving signcryption efficiency and addressing the stringent efficiency and security demands of short‐lived communications in VSN scenarios. Security analysis confirms that the scheme satisfies multiple critical requirements, including message confidentiality, unforgeability, vehicle identity privacy preservation, and traceability of malicious nodes. Performance evaluation indicates that, relative to the latest Certificateless Online/Offline Signcryption (CLOOSC) scheme, the proposed approach achieves a 20% reduction in communication overhead and approximately 50% reduction in signcryption computation costs. This offers a practical and effective solution for secure and efficient message communication in VSN environments.