Efficient vehicle ownership identification scheme based on triple-trapdoor chameleon hash function

In recent years, vehicle theft has become an increasing problem worldwide. A staggering number of cars are stolen every year, and up to half of these are never recovered. Thus, vehicle ownership identification is an important security issue. In this paper, based on the triple-trapdoor chameleon hash function and the concept of the hash-sign-switch paradigm, we propose the vehicle ownership identification scheme (VOIS). The proposed scheme has low computational cost for the government transaction center (GTC) as well as for the vehicle owner (VO), and it allows a third-party, e.g. a police officer, off-line verifying the vehicle ownership is valid or not without connecting to on-line database. & 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.