Abstract Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANET) can provide strong safety for vehicles by taking the advantages of the information which are interchanged among themselves and some infrastructures. Due to this significant application of VANET, message authentication and privacy in VANET is quite critical. Pseudonym PKI technology is a practical solution to ensure the above two properties. However, the performance of the previous works cannot satisfy the requirement for the applications in VANET, such as efficiency and management cost. Most of all pseudonym PKI technologies are comprehensive schemes, like group key and ID-based public key cryptosystem. This also increases the implementation complexity of VANET security. Therefore, we will propose an efficient pseudonym PKI mechanism based on bilinear mapping to improve the performance of the message authentication protocol, certificate tracing and certificate revocation, implementation cost, and management cost.