A novel anonymous authenticated key agreement protocol for vehicular ad hoc networks

Privacy in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANETs) is one of the most important issues to attract users to this new technology. In this paper we propose a novel protocol that allows vehicles using the same application in a VANET to agree on an encryption key to exchange confidential data while preserving the privacy. We do this by combining the Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme (ECIES) with ring signatures and we evaluate the protocol with respect to the privacy of the vehicle. These results clearly demonstrate that the privacy of vehicles can be preserved while reducing considerably the number of necessary pseudonyms in comparison to exploiting ECIES only.