An Effective Pseudonym Generating Scheme for Privacy and Anonymity in VANETs

Privacy and anonymity have become a critical issue for the deployment of vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Pseudonym certificates are the state-of-the-art approach for secure and privacy-friendly message authentication in VANETs. However, most proposed schemes focus on the strategy of pseudonym changing and the privacy among vehicles. Privacy towards certificate authorities is usually neglected, which puts the users’ privacy at risk, if the certificate authorities are not fully trusted. In this paper, we develop a new approach to generate pseudonym credentials anonymously in VANETs. By using ring signatures and one-way accumulator, we propose an effective pseudonym generating scheme which enhancing the privacy and anonymity for honest vehicles. Our scheme provides unconditional anonymous credentials for authentication with trusted third parties and can also track the disputed vehicle.