ATCS: A Novel Anonymous and Traceable Communication Scheme for Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks

Generally vehicles in VANETs should periodically broadcast safety messages. Since safety messages contain traffic related information and are sensitive to location privacy, it is essential to ensure anonymity, authenticity and traceability in broadcast. These conflicting requirements make it difficult to design a secure communication scheme for VANETs. In this paper, we propose a signature scheme which provides anonymous, authenticated and traceable communication based on the efficient combination of (t, n)-threshold signature and Weil Pairing. ATCS scheme aims to provide the authenticity of signed broadcasting messages to prevent internal attacks. And meanwhile the proposed scheme can also keep characteristics of anonymity and traceability. According to the performance evaluation compared with two related schemes, from the perspective of security enhancements, the additional cost of our proposal is acceptable.