Abstract
Summary In the context of mobile crowd sensing (MCS), the security and privacy protection is an important research topic. We investigate an anonymous identity authentication mechanism for MCS networks in this manuscript. To solve the defects of single authentication system, we firstly analyze the design requirements and put forward a hybrid authentication architecture by combining public key infrastructure (PKI) and combined public key (CPK). To ensure key security, we propose a CPK algorithm based on an elliptic curve cryptosystem (ECC) to generate user's key pair and meet the security requirements of users. Particularly, we enrich the Doley‐Yao attacker model in an authentication environment and introduce the concept of “pseudonym set” into the authentication interaction process to solve the large‐scale key management. Finally, we evaluate the proposed anonymous identity authentication mechanism by function verification and performance analysis. Substantial experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our solutions that contribute to privacy protection for the process of authentication by the means of pseudonym.