A secure anonymous key mechanism for privacy protection in VANET

In vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), the malicious messages and tampered messages threat other drivers' life or confuse the traffic order possibly. The anonymity has to be traceable when the law enforcement authority wants to figure out the accountabilities about the anonymity. We describe the problem that characterizes the privacy of VANETs and proposes a new anonymous key mechanism with a system architecture based on bilinear paring and elliptic curve cryptography which adapts to VANETs. The anonymous key pair generated by proposed anonymous key mechanism can realize basic security requirements, and protect identity privacy and location privacy in VANETs communication. The data storage cost can also be decreased when the numbers of node grows quickly.